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BY 



LEWIS CHEESEMAN, D.D. 



PHILADELPHIA: 
PARRY AND M C MILLAN, 

SUCCESSORS TO A. HART, late CAREY & HART. 

1856. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1856, by 

parry & McMillan, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the "United States in and 
for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. 



STEREOTYPED BY L. JOHNSON AND CO. 

PHILADELPHIA. 
PRINTED BY T. K. & P. G. COLLINS. 



PREFACE. 



In introducing the following work to the pub- 
lic, an answer to the following questions may be 
justly expected: — 

What is the subject of which it treats ? 

"What call is there for such a treatise at this 
time ? 

What range has been taken, and what method 
adopted, in treating it ? 

In the title, "Ishmael and the Church," is con- 
tained a short and comprehensive reply to the 
first question. This is the text of the discourse, — 
the thread that ties all its several parts together. 

Ishmael has ever " dwelt in the presence of all 
his brethren," and his fortunes and those of the 
church have been remarkably blended from first 
to last. They cross each other's track in the 
patriarch's tent, in the visions of the prophets, 
in the creed of Mohammed, in the empires of the 
Saracens and Ottomans; so that in treating of 
Ishmael and his descendants we necessarily fol- 
low them through the church; for here their 
way lies. With its affairs they have ever inter- 



IV PREFACE. 

meddled, and on its changeful and suffering des- 
tiny they have ever left the deep impressions of 
their power. Such, then, is our theme : — " Ishmael 
and the Church." 

Such a work as this is demanded by the stir- 
ring events of our own times, — a portable volume, 
accessible to all, comprehending succinctly "Is- 
lamism" in its origin, uses, progress, and end. It 
should be examined in the light of prophecy as 
well as of history, and thus made to appear what it 
truly is, — a creation of Providence, subserving its 
ends and illustrative of its wonders and its ways. 
For such a volume the way seems to be now open. 
It will fill a space occupied by no other. 

We are to bear in mind, also, the present ano- 
malous condition of Turkey. Her disappearance 
from Europe and the appropriation of her soil by 
the Western Powers are events regarded as im- 
minent. She is a bone of contention, — a centre on 
which questions of war and peace hinge, — a gate- 
way to most momentous social, political, and re- 
ligious changes. 

A bare glance at these facts will suggest at once 
that such a theme is necessarily invested with a 
present interest, and, if rightly treated, must 
prove highly acceptable to the reading public. 

Indeed, would we understand "the Italian 
question," the policies and necessities of cabinets 
and princes, this subject needs first to be studied 
and comprehended. Dark problems with respect 
to the future will receive by this means a probable 



PREFACE. V 

solution, and remote and otherwise unperceived 
causes will be seen to have attained a controlling 
maturity, and helpless nations to be afloat upon a 
sea whose resistless surges carry them where they 
will not. 

Political questions have their religious aspects. 
These belong to the divine, and fall within the 
range of his appropriate studies. The questions 
that now agitate Europe are essentially religious. 
Religion underlies all its policies and impulses; 
and hence the religious sympathies of the various 
parties in the strifes of princes are all the more 
important to be understood. It is one design of 
this work to make these palpable. 

As to the range taken, it is wide. The rela- 
tions of Ishmael to the church, and his influence 
on its destinies, from the days of the patriarch to 
the fall of the Ottomans, are comprehended in it. 
The lead of the prophets has been followed, and 
history is expanded just where the prophets pause 
and make it necessary — -just where after an inter- 
val of centuries they point out some new centre of 
influence, that, springing up irresistibly, changes 
the entire course of events ; or just where, the 
crescent crossing into the plane of the church, an 
adorable Providence becomes conspicuous in the 
use that it makes of this formidable power in 
compassing its ends. 

This has made the line of the true church, as 
distinguished from the false, an important object 
of interest and search. It has hence been care- 
2 



VI PREFACE. 

fully eliminated and traced from Asia and Africa 
to Europe and America. 

It has also made the " Testament of Moham- 
med," and the consequent protection of persecuted 
disciples by the Saracens, the subject of special 
inquiry and elucidation. The aggressions of the 
Turks in Asia, — the Crusades, and their favour- 
able effects on the church left behind in Europe, 
— the fall of the Eastern capital, — the desirable 
results accruing from that event, and the indirect 
though real protection of the Eeformation of the 
sixteenth century, arising from the military ardour 
and successes of Solyman the Great, — come also 
under review ; and, throughout, the ways of Provi- 
dence are made obvious, and our confidence in its 
integrity and wisdom becomes revived and con- 
firmed. 

As to method, history has been relied on for 
facts, and the Divine testimony for evidence that 
those facts were arranged by Providence to fulfil 
its purposes. 

The work has been prepared for the Protestant 
world, and care has been taken not to offend 
against its denominational preferences. If the 
author has succeeded in making himself useful 
to the church of our common Master, it will 
be his sufficient reward. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Chap. I. — Ishmael in his Youth 17 

II. — Ishmael in the Wilderness 22 

III. — The Comprehensive Nationality of Ish- 
mael 30 

IV.— His Evil Destiny 36 

V. — The Nationality of Ishmael obtaining De- 
velopment in Mohammed 41 

YI. — Ishmael and Mohammed. — Continued.... 50 

VII. — The Secret of Mohammed's Success 58 

VIII. — Islamism a Perversion of Christianity.... 66 

IX. — The Saracens — Their Fanatic Courage.... 72 

X. — Mohammed and his Successors 82 

XI. — The Saracens, a Scourge to Christendom 89 
XII. — The Saracens, a Scourge to Christendom. 

— Continued 96 

XIII. — Mohammed protecting the True Church : 

The Nestorians 99 

XIV. — Mohammed protecting the True Church : 

The Paulicians 109 

XV. — Mohammed protecting the True Church : 

The Philadelphians 117 

XVI. — Mohammed protecting the True Church : 

The Albigenses 130 

vii 



Vlll CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Chap. XVII.— Founding of Bagdad the End of the 

Prophetic Months..... 134 

XVIII. — The Contrast between Christ and Mo- 
hammed 137 

XIX. — The Saracenic merged in the Ottoman 

Empire 148 

XX. — The Crusades — Their Causes and Ends 158 
XXI.— Peter Waldo on the Track of Peter the 

Hermit 169 

XXIL— Constantinople menaced 175 

XXIIL— The Fall of Constantinople 185 

XXIV.— The Mission of Ishmael one of Strife 194 
XXV. — The Providential Warning disregarded 197 
XXVI.— The Antecedents of the Reformation. 201 
XXVII.— The Art of Printing and the Reforma- 
tion 213 

XXVIII.— The Art of Printing and the Reforma- 
tion. — Continued 222 

XXIX. — The Discovery of America, and the 

Reformation 234 

XXX. — Islamism and the Reformation 240 

XXXI. — Islamism and the Reformation. — Con- 
tinued 254 

XXXII.— The Witnesses not slain 265 

XXXIIL— Ishmael and the Western Allies 281 

XXXIV— Rome— Her Aspirations 292 

XXXV.— The Fall of Islamism 299 

XXX VI.— Isaac's Patrimony restored 313 



ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH, 



CHAPTER I. 

ISHMAEL IN HIS YOUTH. 



" I see a mighty arm, by man unseen, 
Resistless, not to be controll'd, that guides, 
In solitude of unshared energies, 
All these thy ceaseless miracles, world!" 

Lamb, 

There are extensive regions in Asia, Africa, 
and in the east and south of Europe, in which 
the Mohammedan religion prevails. It is false, 
intolerant, and antichristian. Instances there 
are in which, as in Roman Catholic countries, 
this intolerance has been for a season inter- 
mitted; but still, these instances are exceptions 
to a rule otherwise universal, and cannot alter 
a character inherent in the very creed of the 
false prophet, and traced in blood on the pages 
of history and on the symbol of his faith. 

According to the traditions of Mecca — 

17 



18 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

which are in harmony, on this point, with 
the intimations of the prophets of Zion — 
Mohammed sprang from the loins of Abraham, 
and from the scoffer Ishmael. " It is written, 
that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bond- 
maid, the other by a free woman. But he 
who was of the bondwoman was born after 
the flesh ; but he of the free woman was by 
promise. Which things are an allegory. . . . 
For this Agar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and 
answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is 
in bondage with her children." Gal. iv. 
22-25. 

He of the bondwoman was born after the 
flesh, inherited the unsanctified nature of his 
Egyptian mother, carried the stamp of in- 
feriority on his brow, and cherished her en- 
mity to true religion in his heart. Nature, 
true to her laws, had carried down the mental 
and moral characteristics, the physical tastes, 
and spiritual idiosyncrasies, from the mother 
to the child. It occurred also that Sarah's 
jealousy imparted to her domestic rule a 
severity difficult for unrenewed humanity to 
bear, and which, in the mind of the irritated 
Ishmael, doubtless fully justified the bitter com- 
plainings and reproaches of Hagar. " When 
Sarah dealt hardly with her she fled from her 



U3HMAEL IN HIS YOUTH. 19 

face :" Gen. xvi. 6. Day by day her native 
hostility to the patriarch's faith received fresh 
irritation, and in the recesses of the desert, in 
her frequent communings with her son, would 
naturally impress its antipathies deeply upon 
a heart already under the control of a matured 
impiety. " It set him in a way that was not 
good ; he abhorred not evil." Domestic feuds, 
embodying so many causes of enduring and 
increasing repulsiveness, must reach their crisis 
at last ; the parties will seek relief ultimately 
either in the exercise of mutual forbearance or 
in a voluntary separation. The latter was the 
result in the present instance ; the aliens be- 
came outcasts from a home in which the 
mistaken Ha gar had aspired to rise from the 
condition of a subordinate and a slave to that 
of a mistress. 

In the church, when it was placed under 
patriarchal rule, the first-born son succeeded, 
at the death of the patriarch, to his authority, 
dignity, and estates, and took, ordinarily, his 
honoured place as next in the line among the 
illustrious progenitors of the promised Messiah. 
Isaac, the child of promise and of miracle, 
was correctly regarded by Abraham as his 
successor. 

For years previously to the birth of this 



20 ISIIMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

divinely-appointed rival, Ishmael had occupied 
the place and had held in just expectancy the 
coveted immunities of the first-born, — had been 
the accredited heir; and, considering the ex- 
treme age of his parent, there existed no 
reasonable prospect of his being supplanted 
by another. The patriarch also, up to the 
time of the predicted birth of Isaac, had been 
satisfied with this arrangement ; had prayed, 
" Oh that Ishmael might live before thee !" nor 
had he even dreamed of another. But, when 
it was said, " In Isaac shall thy seed be called,"* 
God revealed a preference which, in its very 
nature and in the very terms in which it had 
been conceived, rejected Ishmael from the 
privileges of primogeniture. 

When the solemn yet joyous preparations 
for the festival in which Isaac was to be 
weaned and publicly recognised and installed 
in the succession were in progress, Ishmael was 
seventeen years of age, capable of comprehend- 
ing the extent, at least, of his earthly loss, 
and of an humble and intelligent submission 
to the known will of heaven ; but from that 
hour his rival became the object of his most 
unreasonable envy and resentment. 

* Gen. xxi. 12. 



ISHMAEL IN IIIS YOUTH. 21 

Cain rejected the same Lord on whom Abel 
depended alone for salvation. Ishmael fol- 
lowed in the way of Cain. His desire for the 
patriarchate terminated in its temporal advan- 
tages. When these were alienated in Isaac, he 
scorned the spiritual patrimony and persecuted 
the child of promise. Similar alternate cha- 
racteristics are now discoverable in the fami- 
lies of the godly. Some betake themselves in 
life's young day to Jesus, are seen in the ways 
of piety, and grow up in the fear of the Lord ; 
others become restive and desire to free them- 
selves from the restraints of a Christian fire- 
side. Born after the flesh, they despise the 
blessings of the covenant. Controversies in 
the church, intermarriages with unbelievers, 
the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of 
riches, the very bread and water which they 
acquire and carry with them, serve but to in- 
crease their dreary distance from all succour 
amid the spiritual wastes that surround them. 
Ishmael, in a word, in his rejection of his Lord, 
is an allegory, and represents Christ in the 
covenant as the uniform and chosen test of 
human character, as alternately a sanctuary 
and a rock of offence, "set for the rising and 
falling of many in Israel." 



CHAPTER II. 

ISHMAEL IN THE WILDERNESS. 

" There was in him a vital scorn of all, 
As if the worst had fallen that could befall ; 
He stood a stranger in this breathing world, 
An erring spirit from another hurl'd." 

Byron. 

Beersheba lay at the southern extremity of 
the land of Canaan. Hence, in any descrip- 
tion of the country intended to include its 
entire area, Beersheba was referred to as the 
extreme southern limit. The wilderness of 
Beersheba — sometimes also called the wilder- 
ness of Paran — comprehended a region lying 
still farther south, covered with low shrubs 
and loose sands. On its southern division 
rises abruptly, from the bosom of a vast and 
thirsty plain, the frowning battlements of 
Sinai. In this gloomy solitude, far from the 
abodes of the godly, Hagar and Ishmael found 
their congenial retreat. 

"Agar is Mount Sinai in Arabia." That 
covenant of which she is the allegory "gen- 



ISHMAEL IN THE WILDERNESS. 23 

deretli to bondage."* Ishmael inherited his 
mother's nature, imbibed her religious pre- 
judices, espoused her quarrel against Sarah, 
met with a rival in Isaac, turned against the 
patriarchal church, persecuted the child of pro- 
mise, became an outcast; and thus, step by 
step, commenced his career of wo. 

Such is the covenant of Sinai. It is one of 
hardship and servitude. Under its rigorous 
workings is engendered the base spirit of ser- 
vility. Here the moral bondman toils for life 
in services in which he has no pleasure, is 
goaded on by curses that appal and a con- 
science that torments him ; and yet every step, 
every change, is for the worse, involving him 
in ever-increasing difficulties, and widening 
more and more fatally his separation from the 
blessed vicinity of joy and hope. 

Such, indeed, is ever the normal career of 
unbelief. Whenever the true Messiah is left or 
scorned, whichever plausible alternative after 
that may be substituted for him, such must 
ever be the invariable result; perish at last 
the wanderer must, in an arid waste "where 
no water is." That course is dark and hope- 
less indeed in which Christ is not the centre 

* Gal. iv. 24. 



24 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

to which the weary spirit ever tends. There 
is an awful spiritual solitude before it; and 
there also is that Mount Sinai, with its barren 
declivities and rocky turrets, scarred by thun- 
der ; and beyond it is the Red, red sea in which 
the weary never rest. 

Our uninstructed sympathies ever take 
part with the oppressed and the unfortunate. 
Sarah's jealousies and cruelties are readily 
remembered, together with the destitution of 
the unhappy exiles ; but the want of interest 
on their part in the blessings of a spiritual 
and a higher life, their promptness in for- 
saking without a single regret the pure and 
holy faith of the church because adherence 
to it had become environed with temporary 
obstacles, is as readily pardoned and forgotten, 
though it was their great unworthiness, the 
true cause of their condemnation and ruin. 
God, on this account, because he knew they 
loved him not and cared not for the pro- 
mised spiritual deliverer, dictated the severity. 
Sarah's execrations would have proved all 
impotent and unavailing if God himself had 
not turned against the aliens. They had 
merited his displeasure, since they had in- 
truded themselves into his church, whose 
most sacred things they hated and had dared 



ISmTAEL IN THE WILDERNESS. 25 

to make the objects of their unhallowed 
scorn. 

While the prophetic description — to wit, 
that he should be a wild man, and that his hand 
should be against every man* — involved in it 
no creative or coercive processes, it neverthe- 
less revealed a law inherent in his very nature 
and in that of his race. During the long 
period of twenty-seven hundred years his wild- 
ness remained untamed. Each one of his off- 
spring, separated from all others in his sym- 
pathies for himself alone, maintained his own 
proud personal independence and marked out 
for himself his own solitary track. Submission 
to a chief, if made at all, arose from interest, 
and was cast off, transferred, or continued, at 
pleasure. In predatory bands in the days of 
Jeremiah, they (the descendants of Ishmael) 
sat for the travellers in the ways of the wilder- 
ness,*)* dreaded by all, lying concealed in the 
shadows of mountains, or peering from behind 
the clumps of trees that, bordering the water- 
courses, invited the wayfarer, at burning noon, 
to repose. The captive Israelites, released from 
servitude in Babylon, crossed the track of this 
inhospitable foe and made grateful mention of 
the good hand of God upon them, in that he 

* Gen. xvi. 12. f Jer. iii. 2. 



26 ISHMAEL AND THE CHUECH. 

had delivered them from " such as lay in wait 
by the way."* Impelled by hunger or by 
lust of plunder, their marauding companies, 
mounted on the fleet horse of the wilderness 
that stumbled not,f made frequent incursions 
into districts governed by neighbouring emirs. 
The swift and stealthy advance was effected 
under cover of night. When the morning 
rose, "and the oxen" (of the unsuspecting) 
"were ploughing and the asses feeding beside 
them, the Sabeans" (or Ishmaelites) " fell upon 
them and took them away."J The assault, 
seen perchance by a flying servant whose less 
fortunate companions were slain, is reported; 
but redress is unthought of and pursuit im- 
possible: the wily robbers had vanished as 
they came, — in unknown paths and in the 
solitudes of the wilderness. The Bedouins of 
the present day perpetuate the original cha- 
racter—the wild and warlike habits of the 
earliest times, and form a continuous illustra- 
tion of the extreme individuality and lawless- 
ness of the descendants of Ishmael. 

This character, also, is one that equally de- 
velops itself in that mighty offshoot from the 
parent stock which has spread the shadow of 
its rule for ages over Arabia and over the 

* Ezra viii. 31. f Isa. lxiii. 13. % Job. i. 15. 



ISHMAEL IN THE WILDERNESS. 27 

entire Southern hemisphere. Ishmael, as it 
had been previously revealed in the prophecy 
concerning him, became a great nation ; and 
in this new form of his continued existence 
were merged the idiosyncrasies of the original 
and isolated type. In other words, the indi- 
vidual, ever unreliable, treacherous, and anti- 
christian, incapable alike of a permanent 
adherence to a treaty or of a continued sub- 
mission to a ruler, when once fully subdued 
and constituting with his fellows a great 
nationality, made it witlj respect to all other 
nations just what the individual man had 
previously been with respect to all other indi- 
viduals. It became the world's disturbing 
centre, and broke in alike for centuries upon 
all its harmonies. 

The identity of the same people in succes- 
sive ages is more than conventional or legal; 
it has its seat in the constitution of things, in 
nature itself, and belongs to a nation in its 
successive generations, just as it belongs to 
a man in the successive periods of his life. 
His body is not composed of the same particles 
at fifty of which it was at twenty ; his mind 
has, likewise, had an infinite succession of 
volitions and emotions; and yet, though in so 
many respects a new and a different creature, 



28 ISHMAEL AND THE CHUECH. 

lie still is the same, and is so held to be, both 
in law and in fact. " Who ever perished be- 
ing innocent?" Under the government of a 
righteous God punishment pursues the guilty. 
Amalek was cut off by Saul for murders com- 
mitted by a previous generation four hundred 
years before. (1491 B.C.) Ex. xvii. 14-16: 
" The Lord said unto Moses, Write this for a 
memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears 
of Joshua : for I will utterly put out the re- 
membrance of Amalek from under heaven. 
And Moses built an ajtar, and called the name 
of it Jehovah-nissi : for he said, Because the 
Lord hath sworn that the Lord will have war 
with Amalek from generation to generation." 
(1070 B.C.) 1 Sam. xv. 2, 3 : " Thus saith the 
Lord of hosts, I remember that which Amalek 
did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in 
the way when he came up from Egypt. Now 
go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all 
that they have." Yerse 9 : " But Saul and 
the people spared Agag." Verses 10, 11 : 
" Then came the word of the Lord unto 
Samuel, saying, It repenteth me that I have 
set up Saul to be king." Yerses 32, 33 : 
" Then said Samuel, Bring ye hither to me 
Agag the king of the Amalekites. And Agag 
came unto him delicately. And Agag said, 



ISHMAEL IN TnE WILDERNESS. 29 

Surely the bitterness of death is past. And 
Samuel said, As thy sword hath made women 
childless, so shall thy mother be childless 
among women. And Samuel hewed Agag in 
pieces before the Lord in Gilgal." Great social 
wrongs, unredressed and unregretted, and still 
repeated by a seed of evil-doers, demanded the 
providential visitation. The children had risen 
up "an increase of sinful men to augment yet 
the fierce anger of the Lord."* Samuel remind- 
ed Agag of this; and, while we do not under- 
stand him to deny his connection with the guilt 
of a former age, he assures him that he suffers 
for his own: — "As thy sword hath made wo- 
men childless, so shall thy mother be childless 
among women." Such is the unity and re- 
sponsibility of each distinct race. 

Destitute of all fraternal loves and local 
attachments, his hand against every man, an 
outlaw and a robber, Ishmael entered on his 
chosen domain and became the lord and the 
terror of the wilderness. On its wild clans, 
and on the twelve powerful tribes and the 
great nation that sprang from him, he stamped 
in indelible characters his own native love of 
war and plunder and his ever-living animosity 
to the blessed Messiah. 

* Num. xxxii. 14. 
3* 



CHAPTER III. 

THE COMPREHENSIVE NATIONALITY OF ISHMAEL. 

"The gather'd guilt of elder times 
Shall reproduce itself in crimes." 

Gal. iv. 24, 25 : " Which things are an alle- 
gory: for these are the two covenants; the 
one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth 
to bondage, which is Agar. For this Agar is 
Mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jeru- 
salem which now is, and is in bondage with 
her children." The allegory has a wide range. 
There is not only more in it than appears in 
the original narrative, but in this instance it 
is perhaps unusually comprehensive, and in- 
cludes the personal rejection of Ishmael and 
that of his posterity, as also those other 
descendants of the patriarch who, moved with 
envy, delivered their Lord to a cruel death, 
persecuted those born after the Spirit, and were 
become "contrary to God and contrary to all 



men. * 



This Agar is Mount Sinai, in Arabia, and 

* 1 Tbess. ii. 15. 
30 



COMPREHENSIVE NATIONALITY OF ISIIMAEL. 31 

•answereth to Jerusalem, which now is, and is 

in bondage with her children." Having re- 
jected her Lord, (thus Paul instructs the 
church in the above-quoted passage,) Jerusa- 
lem, amid her faded glories as a doomed city, 
was for this in bondage with her misguided 
offspring. In a few short years she too, like 
the son of the bondwoman, would become out- 
cast from patrimonial possessions and spiri- 
tual privileges, and be houseless, the sport ot 
oppression and want, in that wide wilderness 
in which she should wander and perish for 
ages. The wrath of Koman legions in her 
spoliation and in her wo would but express 
toward her, as did Sarah's severities toward 
Ishmael, the punitive justice of offended 
Heaven. And when the day should ulti- 
mately come for Isaac's effectual calling and 
spiritual birth, — when, raised from the slum- 
ber of centuries and weaned from the love of 
the world, his return should commence, and 
the great feast should be spread in his native 
mountains, and he should be about to be so- 
lemnly installed anew in the blessed line of 
the spiritual succession, — then (as we under- 
stand the prophet*) shall the scoffing and per- 

* Isaiah xxv. 5-8; Dan. xi. 44, 45. 



32 ISHMAEL AND THE CHUKCH. 

secuting Ishmael again and for the last time 
become an outcast from the patriarch's down- 
trodden heritage. The power of Sarah's pro- 
phetic curse shall revive afresh amid the ruins 
of her fallen towers, the perils of her returning 
children, and prove mightier than the armies 
of the aliens. 

Ishmael was, according to the prediction, to 
" dwell in the presence of all his brethren."* 
And, as the great conquerors of the world have 
ever failed to subdue Arabia, — as still, from the 
earliest times till now, the Arabs have watched 
the traveller who has crossed their unprofitable 
sands and made him pay tribute, — as they 
have escaped successively the rule of the Per- 
sians, the Macedonians, and the Komans, — it 
has been supposed that this passage was in- 
tended as a prophetic description of the future 
independence of their wild tribes, from age 
to age, in their own hereditary dominions. 
"Arabia, though its frontier-provinces ex- 
perienced some vicissitudes, preserved in the 
depths of its deserts its primitive character 
and independence; nor had its nomadic tribes 
ever bent their haughty necks to servitude."*)* 

Gibbon, in his great eagerness to cast discredit 

* Gen. xvi. 12. -j- Irving. 



COMPREHENSIVE NATIONALITY OF ISIIMAEL. 33 

on this prophecy as fairly furnishing satis- 
factory evidence in favour of the inspiration 
of the Scriptures, first sneers at the idea and 
then denies the fact of the continued indepen- 
dence of the Ishmaelites ; but, before he closes 
this extraordinary paragraph, he indirectly re- 
tracts and fully contradicts his first state- 
ment. "The perpetual independence of the 
Arabs has been the theme of praise among 
strangers and natives; and the arts of con- 
troversy transform this singular event into a 
prophecy and a miracle in favour of the pos- 
terity of Ishmael. Some exceptions, that can 
neither be dismissed nor eluded, render this 
mode of reasoning as indiscreet as it is super- 
fluous. The kingdom of Yemen has been suc- 
cessively subdued by the Abyssinians, the 
Persians, the sultans of Egypt, and the 
Turks; the holy cities of Mecca and Medina 
have repeatedly bowed under a Scythian 
tyrant; and the Koman province of Arabia 
embraced the peculiar wilderness in which 
Ishmael and his sons must have pitched their 
tents in the face of their brethren. Yet 
these exceptions are temporary or local : the 
body of the nation has escaped the yoke of 
the most powerful monarchies. The arms of 
Sesostris and Cyrus, of Pompey and Trajan, 



34 ISHMAEL AND THE CHUECH. 

could never achieve the conquest of Arabia. 
The present sovereign of the Turks may exer- 
cise a shadow of jurisdiction; but his pride 
is reduced to solicit the friendship of a people 
whom it is dangerous to provoke and fruitless 
to attack."* 

Others suggest that the text simply describes 
the place of their abode as it related geogra- 
phically to the land of Canaan. It should be 
" to the east of their brethren." The meaning 
is confessedly obscure ; and, though inclined to 
adopt as most correct the view first named, 
yet, were either opinion the received one, it 
would not affect the obvious meaning of the 
other portions of this remarkable prophecy. 
If, as we have seen, the historic record, after 
you exhaust its literal meaning, is also alle- 
gorical, and comprehends in it even the lineal 
descendants of Isaac, who, in imitation of their 
scoffing brother, turn their hand against every 
man, then, though the Bedouin tribes who are 
the present robber-lords of Paran may be the 
lineal descendants of Ishmael, still, the alle- 
gory fairly comprehends all the tribes to whom 
Ishmael became related by intermarriage and 
by mastery, together with any other of the 

* Gibbon. 



COMPREHENSIVE NATIONALITY OF ISHMAEL. 35 

descendants of Abraham by Keturah, whose 
tribal life was finally merged and lost in his 
own. 

It is enough, indeed, for our purpose, that 
the characteristics of Ishmael — his love of war 
and booty, his irreconcilable hatred of the 
Christian religion, and his disposition ever to 
persecute its nominal or its real disciples — 
have impressed themselves alike on all the races 
united by his descendants under the sway of 
the Koran ; enough, that Mohammed attracted 
to his standard the contending factions that 
descended from his renowned progenitor, and, 
out of these wild elements, formed and founded 
his empire; enough, that throughout Asia, 
Africa, and a part of Europe, other nations 
were confessedly lost in it, as rivers and 
streams are lost in the sea. 



CHAPTER IV. 

HIS EVIL DESTINY. 

" The Maker justly claims the world he made: 
In this the right of Providence is laid ; 
Its sacred majesty through all depends 
On using second means to work his ends." 

Parnell. 

"What a sweet relief is given to that spiritual 
night which stretches its gloomy curtains from 
the fall to the resurrection-morn, when, one 
by one, the living types of the Messiah, in an 
unbroken succession, springing up amid whis- 
pers of comfort and angel footfalls, span the 
flight of intervening ages with the ever-recur- 
ring evidences of a coming and a glorious dawn ! 
It is among these that even Ishmael, during 
seventeen years, holds his elevated position. 
The patriarch regards him as his heir; and, 
as he was his first-born son, he continued to 
be the visible representative of Christ, in the 
succession, until Isaac, by divine direction, 
took his place. His rejection, however, as a 
progenitor of a coming Saviour, did not neces- 

36 



HIS EVIL DESTINY. 37 

sarily remove him from his saving interest in 
a Redeemer. By the divine will he fell from 
the succession; but by his own fault he fell 
from the covenant, and sank, a baleful meteor, 
to the earth. Obviously, however, he is a 
being, though never so evil, whose existence is 
invested with no ordinary interest; since that 
wide world into which he is banished is to be 
made the theatre of his wonderful providential 
mission. God's kingdom is immeasurably great; 
and, in its administration by the infinite One, 
no instructions are gathered from the lessons 
of experience to modify or change original 
arrangements. Indeed, all the innumerable 
details of the comprehensive rule are original 
and immutable, lying back of the genesis of 
the heavens and the earth in the fiat of the 
uncreated mind. In a kingdom so vast, and in 
events whose origin must remain hidden in the 
bosom of remote ages, it is not strange to see 
things that to human sagacity appear use- 
less or even injurious, — blots on the cheek of 
nature, imperfections in divine creations, con- 
necting themselves only with the chariot of 
God as mire on the pavement or dust from its 
wheels. But the appearances are most decep- 
tive. The globe itself, curtained in night, Hew 
for unknown ages on its desolate track, with 



38 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

its elements slowly maturing, that they might 
be ready at the appointed time to be formed 
into a habitation for its living generations. 
And in its present state, with its ocean-beds, 
volcanic fires, atmospheric plagues, and mighty 
annual deposits of perished life, it is but ma- 
turing for another change in which, purified by 
the flame that consumes it, it shall be repro- 
duced and covered in every part of it with 
more than its primeval bloom and beauty..* In 
forming an opinion, then, of the utility of 
things in God's immense and eternal kingdom, 
we should not forget the lessons of humility 
which lie all along our daring flight upward 
toward that point, immeasurably distant, which 
separates the wisdom of God from the ignorance 
of a creature. The long preparation of Ish- 
mael's descendants for their mission of wo, and 
the long separation of Isaac from Canaan, and 
the long night that settled for ages over Europe, 
Asia, Africa, and America, are but preparatory 
processes to the introduction of a better and a 
brighter day. What though we cannot account 
for these mysterious footprints in the ways of 
heaven? what though the gulfs we attempt to 
fathom are of an unknown depth and their 
unsightly bosoms covered with a pall? in the 
fulness of time, the great results will have 



HIS EVIL DESTINY. 6\) 

been secured, and God shall say, " Let there be 
light." It is a voluntary folly in any to hide 
from his eyes the agency of Heaven in all this 
world's beauty or deformity, in all its good or 
evil. " I form the light and create the dark- 
ness; I make peace and create evil; I the 
Lord do all these things." Night and day, 
volcanoes and Edens, war and peace, demons 
and angels, hell and heaven, are alike his crea- 
tions, are alike subservient to his ultimate will. 
Moses was born and reared in the court of the 
Pharaohs, and, for eighty years, kept under 
processes of discipline which fitted him for his 
future mission. The broken remnants of par- 
tially-subjugated tribes were reserved in Ca- 
naan to be thorns in the sides and briers in 
the eyes of offending Israel. And when Ish- 
mael was banished, and wandered in the soli- 
tudes of Paran, he was for the same reason 
not left to perish. He was a providential 
instrument, and his was, though an evil, yet a 
protected, life. In that thirsty desert, sur- 
rounded by interminable and burning sands, 
without shelter from the sun, and worn out 
in a long and fruitless search for water, he 
fainted, and was left under a shrub to die ; 
and, but for a divine interposition, this had 
been his end and the point at which we might 



40 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

now have commenced to write a totally differ- 
ent history of Asia and of the world. Great 
events were suspended on the restoration of that 
wasting breath. Hence God said to his mother, 
"Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him in thine 
hand; for I will make of him a great nation. 
And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well 
of water ; and she went, and filled the bottle 
with water, and gave the lad drink. And God 
was with the lad; and he grew, and dwelt in 
the wilderness, and became an archer." Yes, 
God was with the lad, as he is with the tiger 
and his cubs, the earthquake, the pestilence, 
and the tornado. He was with him to make 
him a minister of his providence, — to fulfil its 
decrees and to inflict its chastisements on the 
guilty. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE NATIONALITY OF ISHMAEL OBTAINING 
DEVELOPMENT IN MOHAMMED. 

" Their breath is agitation, and their life 
A storm thereon they ride." Byron. 

The transition of the descendants of Ishmael 
from a state of extreme personal independence 
and of selfish isolation to that of an organ- 
ized and a united people was effected by Mo- 
hammed in the seventh century. The religious 
creed of this extraordinary man was artfully 
adapted to the native and long-cherished tastes 
of his countrymen. It turned their guilty 
love of war and spoil and their long-indulged 
animosity to the true Messiah into the ele- 
ments of success, threw open the gates of 
unbelieving provinces and kingdoms to in- 
vasion, and doomed them alike to tribute, the 
Koran, or the sword. An army, irresistible 
from its fanatic courage if not from its dis- 
ciplined valour, sprang "from the dust of his 
feet" and took peace from the world. The 
fierce contentions of twenty-seven centuries 

4* C 41 



42 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

had been, up to this period, either the resist- 
ance of intruders on their appropriated soil, 
or the bloody strifes of individuals, families, 
and tribes. A spirit had reigned which had 
hitherto acknowledged no code of justice or 
of honour, no common tribunal to which 
the weak could appeal for redress against 
the strong, — none, but that which each one 
carried in the nice appreciations of his own 
mind or in the sure and sudden stroke of his 
scimitar. Falling back upon his tact or cou- 
rage, the injured committed the arbitrations or 
the inflictions of the lex talionis to no other 
hands than his own. An unrelenting foe, he 
watched with calm and unsuspected vigilance 
the obnoxious party, for the opportunity of 
successful revenge. His victim fell in the very 
act of embracing a supposed friend. Life's 
warm current often purpled the lonely heath 
with a deeper dye ; and the blood of war, shed 
in peace, was often put without remorse u on 
his girdle and in his shoes." The traditions of 
the Arabs recount the occurrence of seventeen 
hundred battles which preceded the birth of 
their prophet. Up to this period Ishmael's 
hand had ever been put forth, either in self- 
defence, or it had been stained with fraternal 
blood. 



MOHAMMED. 43 

The first outbreak in which his wild de- 
scendants became formidable and left their 
burning solitudes to interrupt the peace of 
nations was under the discipline of Moham- 
med. He breathed through "their roving 
bands the spirit of a common fanaticism, sup- 
pressed their domestic feuds, and turned their 
united strength against mankind." How won- 
derful the prophecy ! — " He will be a wild 
man ; his hand will be against every man, and 
every man's hand against him:" Gen. xvi. 12. 
" Behold, I have blessed him, and will make 
him fruitful, and will multiply him exceed- 
ingly; twelve princes shall he beget, and I 
will make him a great nation :" Gen. xvii. 20. 
"And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a 
star fall from heaven unto the earth : and to 
him was given the key of the bottomless pit :" 
Eev. ix. 1. According to this prophecy, a great 
national life had been communicated. The facts 
of history show that it gained ultimate de- 
velopment in the Arabian impostor. He pos- 
sessed the secret of power. " To him was 
given the key of the bottomless pit." He was 
born a.d. 569. And, though his parents died 
when he was yet an infant, his uncles were rich 
and noble, and the most considerable of these 
became his guardian. At the age of twenty- 



44 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

five he married Kadijah, a widow of rank and 
fortune, and at once took his station among 
the proudest of his countrymen. His admirers 
are fond of representing him as having had 
a well-knit and vigorous frame ; as insinuating 
and persuasive ; with a world of intelligence in 
the dark eye that lighted up the ever-varying 
features of his expressive countenance; with 
vocal cadences of rare harmony, that swept the 
secret chords of human sympathies and gave 
character and sway to his slightest utterances ; 
with a memory most retentive; with a judg- 
ment invested with an intuitive maturity, — a 
maturity reached by others only after long 
and careful study; as generous and self-pos- 
sessed : — in a word, as having had in himself 
that wonderful concentration of all those quali- 
ties by which he was enabled to rise to power, 
by which he became the profound master of 
uncultivated tribes, on whose credulity he 
knew how to practise, and whose ruinous in- 
dominancy he could discipline and wield. 
This, I think, cannot be justly regarded as a 
mere fancy sketch. Providential instruments 
have ever had impressed upon them the law 
of a most perfect adaptation to their ends ; and 
for this reason this instrument was fitted to 
become at once the idol and the oracle of the 



MOHAMMED. 45 

desert, the terror and the scourge of erring 
Christendom. The secret of his power was, in 
this and in every other respect, the secret de- 
cree of heaven. 

This will appear all the more obvious when 
you consider how numerous the obstacles that 
barricaded his way to the throne and re- 
pressed — almost fatally — his proud aspirations 
after dominion. In his infancy he is an orphan. 
His parents leave him without even the means 
of subsistence. All that falls to him from pa- 
trimonial estates is five camels and a maid- 
servant. At the age of forty he had, after 
most earnest toil, made but three converts : 
one of these was his wife. He proclaimed the 
unity of God, — an offensive dogma among the 
polytheists of Arabia. They were enraged, 
and sought his life. Among both his execu- 
tioners and his judges it was arranged that a 
sword from each tribe should be buried in his 
heart, that their kindred tribes might mutually 
bear his blood if his death should rouse to 
war, or, as superstition might have suggested, 
mutually share the benefit of the expiation at 
the altars of their gods. 

At the dead hour of night he made his 
escape from his dwelling, now narrowly 
watched, and unexpectedly eluded the vigi- 



46 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

lance of the disappointed and remorseless 
Koreishites. Accompanied by a single friend, 
he concealed himself for three days in a 
cavern in Mount Thor. The Koreishites ex- 
plored every supposed hiding-place in the vi- 
cinity of Mecca, — came to the very mouth of 
the cave in which he was lying concealed. 
Here a spider's web and a pigeon's nest,* " art- 
fully arranged," proved a successful deception. 
His unsuspecting foes turned away. The next 
morning finds him springing from the top of 
the rock to his camel's back and flying for 
safety to Medina. The quick tramp of pur- 
suers at this critical moment startles his ear : 
his foes are indeed close upon him. On that 
unbounded plain, as far as the eye could reach, 
not a hill, not a mound, not a shrub, offers a 
hiding-place to the exposed and defenceless 
fugitive. The nest of a bird, the web of a 
spider even, are not now his frail protectors, — 
cannot now mislead and turn away his armed 
foes. But, as Ishmael had escaped death 
even when the chill of its last agony froze his 
blood, so is Mohammed also destined to escape, 



* "During the three days they had lain hid here, a spider, 
they tell us, had spun its web over the mouth of the cave, 
and a pigeon laid two eggs near it." — Ochley. 



MOHAMMED. § i 

since his, too. is a protected life. His secret 
mission it was that threw a spell upon his 
captors. His fine figure, generous gifts, fair 
promises, and insinuating address, abated their 
resentment. It is said, also, that the horse of 
the fierce Soraka fell at this juncture, and. re- 
ling it as an evil omen, the savage returned 
with his band. It was as though it had been 
by a divine intervention that he escaped ; and 
such. I think, we are bound to regard it. No 
doubt the Koreish troop were amazed even at 
themselves, and at an event which the Mo- 
hammedans have ever since deemed miraculous. 
i; In this eventful moment the lance of an 
Arab might have changed the history of the 
world."* 

After sixteen days Mohammed reached Me- 
dina hi safety. He was mounted on a she- 
camel. It was all of this world he had retained ; 
it was all the throne he had to occupy ; but he 
med, as far as circumstances admitted, the 
ensigns of royalty, and entered Medina with 
an unfurled turban lor his banner, suspended 
from the point of Boreida's lance, and a palm- 
leaf canopy held over his head by his follow- 
er-. His train and body-guard amounted now 

Gibbon. 



48 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

to seventy men. In this city his reverses ter- 
minated : his converts rallied around him, 
Medina acknowledged his mission, and in 
seven years from the Hegira* he returned to 
Mecca and entered it in triumph. He had now 
become both the prophet and the prince of his 
converted countrymen, — the former and the 
leader of the first general confederacy among 
the descendants of Ishmael. Fierce tribes, 
that force could not subdue nor fear intimi- 
date, were under him, made the victims of a 
despotism to which superstition imparted an 
absoluteness and a control more intimate and 
effective than any other. His body, until his 
death, was regarded as invulnerable and im- 
mortal. When he died, the reported event 
was rejected as a fable ; and, while he lived, 
every wish, every motion, was carefully ob- 
served and religiously venerated.f 

Many pages have been written for the pur- 
pose of tracing and restricting his sudden 
elevation and wonderful successes to second 
causes ; but to all this it is sufficient to reply, 
that second causes were divinely arranged and 



* The era of the flight from Mecca to Medina, 
j* "The hair of his head that falls/' said an eye-witness, 
"is picked up by his devout soldiers. " 



MOHAMMED. 49 

i 

made to minister to the will of heaven, while 
they, at the same time, ministered to the ele- 
vation of the impostor. But for this, he might 
have died in his cradle. But for this, the web 
of a spider would not have deceived, nor his 
eloquent tongue or the fall of a horse palsied 
the arm of those who, thirsting for his blood, 
had overtaken his flying steps. 



CHAPTER VI. 

ISHMAEL AND MOHAMMED. — CONTINUED. 

"There is a fire and motion of the soul 
Which will not dwell in its own narrow being, 
And, but once kindled, quenchless evermore, 
Preys upon high adventure." Byron. 

The ninth chapter of the Apocalypse is 
generally admitted to relate to the Saracenic 
and Turkish empires. The correctness of this 
view I do not think it necessary to defend, 
believing that the few who dissent from it 
will be more likely to be convinced by illustra- 
tions of the prophecy, drawn from the facts of 
history, than by any direct attack upon their 
opinions. An error is often most successfully 
refuted by a clear presentation of the truth. 

"And the fifth angel sounded; and I saw a 
star fall from heaven unto the earth : and to 
him was given the key of the bottomless pit. 
And he opened the bottomless pit, and there 
arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a 
great furnace :" Eev. ix. 1, 2. With a key the 
door is opened, the apartment is entered. It 

50 



MOHAMMED. 51 

is the emblem of power. He to whom heaven 
gives it is destined to have dominion. It will 
fit the wards of every lock; the bolts must 
give way before it. The expression " To him 
was given" suggests that the agent designated 
is a man ; and the word " star" that he was 
an illustrious person. The passage points us 
to a distinguished individual providentially 
called to execute the divine will. Mohammed 
not only descended from Ishmael and from 
Abraham, but he belonged to the Koreish 
line,* and to that branch of it regarded not 
only as the most considerable for its nobility, 
wealth, and power, but also most remarkable 
as having had committed to its keeping, for 
many generations, the sacred temple of Mecca. 
Amid its mysterious ceremonials Mohammed 
had been instructed and reared, and from his 
youth had been known throughout Arabia as 
its most accomplished and most devoted hiero- 
phant. The same star that falls rises and 
opens the pit. Loosened from its zone in the 
Abrahamic covenant, it descends to make the 
world the future theatre of its baleful influ- 
ences ; and, as John the Baptist was but the 

* He descended from Hashem, the father of the Hashem- 
ites, and a prince of great distinction in Arabia in his day. 



52 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

reproduction of Elijah, so Ishmael reappears 
also in his successor. The restless energy of 
the long-silent founder of the robber-kingdom 
starts from the ashes of his sepulchre and 
walks abroad again in the hardness and daring 
of his martial son. The mighty progenitor 
marked out for himself his own track, — 
stamped his own character on more than fifty 
generations. His renowned descendant had 
the same gift of power, invented the dark 
sentences of Hara, and founded an empire in 
blood. By the retained rite of circumcision, 
as well as by the testimony of tradition, he 
and his associate dwellers in the desert have 
justly claimed to be the lineal descendants of 
Ishmael. If the rite of circumcision among 
the dispersed Jews proves their descent from 
Abraham, then the same rite in immemorial 
usage among the large and powerful families 
of the Koreishites should be received as 
equally satisfactory evidence of their descent 
from the same original stock. Palestine and 
Arabia have alike the seal of circumcision 
and are alike under the rule of the patriarch's 
seed. 

"And there arose a smoke out of the pit, as 
the smoke of a great furnace." Mecca, the 
sacred city of the Mohammedans, is situated 



MOHAMMED. 5o 

in the centre of a barren plain and surrounded 
by naked and precipitous mountains. Within 
its walls is the Kaaba, the sacred house or 
temple of the Arabs, built, as their traditions 
affirm, by Abraham and Ishmael, and accord- 
ing to a heaven-descended model. Within the 
same enclosure is situated the memorable well 
Zem-zem, said to have been the one pointed 
out by the angel to Hagar when her child 
was dying with thirst. In the walls of the 
Kaaba was placed the sacred stone that, tradi- 
tion says, came down from heaven. Laying 
aside for the time their weapons and their 
feuds, the idolaters were accustomed to meet 
here annually, and from the earliest times, for 
the worship of their idols. Seven times they 
made the circuit of the temple, and, having 
kissed the black stone* in the walls, they 
went forth to resume their weapons and their 
wars. This desolate spot — the centre and 

* The black stone, which the Mohammedans held in great 
reverence and believed to be one of the stones of Paradise 
which fell down with Adam from heaven, is a small stone 
set in silver and fixed in the southeast corner of the Kaaba, 
about four feet from the ground. It is said to be white 
within, but to have turned black on the outside by the 
sins of the people, or, more probably, by the kisses of the 
pilgrims." — Ocklcy's /Saracens, Part III. 
6* 



54 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

support of a dark superstition — was the place 
of Mohammed's nativity ; and the gloomy pit 
on the slopes of Mount Hara, hard by, the 
crater whence issued his desolating creed. 
The character of this creed, its unscrupulous 
perversions of truth, the opposition to the 
Messiah which it inculcates, and the unclean- 
ness and cruelty to which it incites, are alike 
in keeping with the known sympathies of the 
father of lies, are alike suggestive of pande- 
monial influences. The surrounding desert is 
likewise a vast solitude, without either water 
or verdure, and covered with loose sands. 
To these the tornado sometimes imparts the 
motions of a troubled sea, in whose burning 
bosom caravans and armies perish. The 
winds — especially those that prevail from the 
southeast — are usually burdened with heat, 
and are often destructive of animal life. "At 
eleven o'clock," says Bruce, "while we con- 
templated with great pleasure the rugged top 
of Chiggre, to which we were fast approaching, 
and where we were to solace ourselves with 
plenty of good water, Idris, our guide, cried 
out, with a loud voice, ' Fall upon your faces, 
for here is the Simoom !' I saw from the south- 
east a haze come, in colour like the purple 
part of the rainbow, but not so compressed or 



MOHAMMED. 55 

thick. It did not occupy twenty yards in 
breadth, and was about twelve feet high from 
the ground. It was a kind of blush upon the 
air, and moved very rapidly, for I scarce could 
turn to fall upon the ground with my head to 
the northward, when I felt the heat of its 
current plainly upon my face. We all lay flat 
on the ground, as if dead, till Idris told us it 
was blown over. The meteor or purple haze 
which I saw was indeed passed, but the light 
air which still blew was of a heat to threaten 
suffocation. For my part, I found distinctly in 
my breast that I had imbibed a part of it; 
nor was I free of an asthmatic sensation till I 
had been some months in Italy, at the baths 
of Poretta, near two years afterwards." 

These hot blasts might well be regarded as 
t^e fiery gusts that rush up from the prison- 
house of the lost. The hills rise abruptly 
from the cheerless plain. No forests protect, 
with their grateful shade, from the blaze of 
noon; no rivers cross the weary track; they 
are absorbed in sandy basins of unknown 
depths; and, when an oasis is reached, the 
springs that rise to the surface are brackish 
and offensive, from the saline or bituminous 
deposits through which they have made their 
secret way. It is a region in contrast with 



56 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

every other inhabited by man. If, amid the 
flowers and fruits, the verdure, salubrity, and 
melody, the gorgeousness of the skies and of 
the plumage of unknown birds, in the New 
World, the early navigators believed them- 
selves in the immediate vicinity of the garden 
of Eden, and made its precise situation the 
object of persevering search, then might the 
Evangelist, in his vision of the Kaaba, as it 
presented itself to him, surrounded by no signs 
of vegetable life, standing on deep beds of 
sulphur and of salt, overshadowed by desolate 
mountains, in one of which opened the gloomy 
cell of the great deceiver of the southern 
hemisphere, describe it as the hold of foul 
spirits, the open crater of the bottomless pit. 

There are also traceable resemblances be- 
tween fallen spirits and the gaunt and wily ban- 
ditti that lie in wait amid the dusky haunts of 
the desert. Their fierce black eyes, elfish locks, 
high cheek-bones, and dragon-teeth, warn you 
at their approach of the neighbourhood of evil. 
Such faces never mask a heart of love. They 
are the outward signs of the long-indulged 
impulses of cruelty and selfishness. They are 
the designations of a race whom heaven re- 
strains not. Their home has ever been one 
of unatoned wrong. Erom it pity fled when 



MOHAMMED. 57 

the scoffer set his foot in it; since when its 
retaliations, enraged into fiercer reprisals at 
every turn, have arrested in rivers of kindred 
blood an increase which, but for this, would 
of itself, in its own native outworkings, have 
proved fatal to Eastern civilization. 

Thus, in a thirsty and boundless waste, 
swept by fiery winds, traversed by sharp and 
naked mountains, the hold of superstition, 
deceit, and murder, the patrimony of outcast 
generations, John saw a master-spirit rise, 
open its pandemonial gates, and let loose its 
hitherto pent-up furies upon erring Christen- 
dom. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE SECRET OF MOHAMMED'S SUCCESS. 

" To him was given the key of the bottomless pit." — St. John. 
" The sword is the key of heaven and of hell." — Mohamjyied. 

A great idea, clearly brought out by a 
master-mind, possesses often a volcanic power. 
Of this kind was that which Moses presented 
in the court of the Pharaohs. It asserted the 
supremacy of God over all kings, kingdoms, 
and laws, and demanded, on that single ground, 
the immediate and unconditional liberation of 
his people. "Thus saith the Lord God of 
Israel : Let my people go." Thus was asserted 
God's unbounded and righteous dominion. It 
was a lost truth. Its reproduction convulsed 
the world : proud kings were awed, and idola- 
trous kingdoms toppled and fell before it. In 
that great idea God "beheld and drove asunder 
the nations. He uttered his voice; the earth 
melted." 

A great idea gained distinct utterance in the 
commencement of the Christian era. It an- 

58 



THE SECRET OF MOHAMMED'S SUCCESS. 59 

nounced the righteousness of faith, — a lost 
though a vital truth. It agitated the com- 
monwealth of Rome to its political and moral 
centres as though it had been the voice of 
God, and changed the religions and habits of 
all its provinces. The reproduction of the 
same idea in the sixteenth century produced 
the greatest and the most desirable revolution 
of modern times. 

When Mohammed gave himself up to the 
devices or the rhapsodies of Hara, his country- 
men were the worshippers of the luminaries of 
heaven, and of numerous other deities. Three 
hundred and sixty idols, of every conceivable 
variety of form and ritual known to the Ori- 
entals, filled the niches and adorned the pedes- 
tals of the temple of Mecca. And throughout 
all the world, in the East and in the West, 
wherever the visible church had spread her 
faith, with limited exceptions, there had sprung 
up a disguised paganism. Retaining the names 
of things divine, the church had changed their 
meaning. Her images, the objects of her ado- 
ration, were not called idols, but saints; not 
named Jupiter and Minerva, but Peter and 
Mary, and after the canonized worthies of her 
communion. True religion had tied to the 
mountains. Idolatry had been restored. That 



60 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

we may understand the providential reasons 
for the elevation of the hierophant of the Kaaba 
and of the cavern, at this juncture, to his 
throne, we should not forget or overlook the 
concomitant universal j)revalence of idolatry, 
nor the coincident revelation of the man of 
sin, who had just then become unmasked by 
being proclaimed universal bishop, and had 
commenced openly to exercise his spiritual 
lordship by enforcing the worship of pieces of 
wood, wafer gods, and dead men's bones, pro- 
voking by his idolatries and oppressions the 
retributions of Heaven. 

The creed of the wily Arab was not the 
offspring of chance, but one in the formation 
of which his sagacity had been providentially 
instructed, and which was destined, in work- 
ing out its own hidden life, to develop and 
fulfil the mission to which he and his race 
had been so wonderfully reserved. That creed 
contained a grand and an eternal truth, — a 
truth simple, sublime, and in harmony with 
the teachings of Abraham, Moses, and Messias, 
and yet a truth that put him in debate with 
the world. " There is no God but one I" was 
the short but sententious utterance that shook 
on their polluted thrones the idols of Arabia 
and of Christendom; that originated in the 



THE SECRET OF MOHAMMED'S SUCCESS. 61 

desert that fierce civil war which ended in 
the triumph of Mohammed, and in the union 
of its segregated tribes under the government 
of a single chief. Persuasion and miracles, he 
maintained, had been the abortive alternatives 
in the gentler mission of Jesus; but more 
effective measures were now demanded, and 
Heaven had committed to his hand the sword. 
With it he was required to chastise and reform 
the worlds idolatrous kingdoms. 

Truth is often essential to success, — even 
when error mars and defaces it. The great truth 
that headed the creed of Mohammed turned a 
daring fiction into a probable verity. Both 
were necessary to create an army of fanatics 
and to found the Saracenic empire. He began 
his mission, like Moses, with the professed sen- 
tences of inspiration : but no signs attended 
him ; no sea opened at the exodus of a nation ; 
no mountain, wrapped in fire and darkness, be- 
came for a whole year his mighty oracle. His 
fables about Gabriel's midnight visits to his 
cavern, bringing with him the chapters of the 
Koran, and of his ride on his mysterious Borak 
from Mecca to Jerusalem, and thence through 
the seven heavens, where he passed the veil 
of unity, approached within two bowshots of 
the throne, and felt a cold that pierced his 



62 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

heart as his shoulder was touched by the hand 
of God, were esteemed fables, and awakened 
for him the scorn and persecution of his coun- 
trymen. Ten years he toiled at Mecca. His 
inventions and his eloquence won him few 
converts ; yea, rather alienated his friends and 
exasperated his foes. At length, abandoned 
by all, he mounted his camel and fled for his 
life. His mission thus far had proved a total 
failure, and he must have perished in oblivion 
but for the addenda to his creed, — an after- 
thought to which he is now at length driven 
by defeat and despair. 

He was now become sufficiently enlightened 
as to the hopelessness of his cause if he did 
not at once resort to the alternative of force. 
Moses and our blessed Lord gave credibility 
to their missions by their miracles; but Mo- 
hammed was but a pretender, and could suc- 
ceed in but one way. When this idea had 
at length struggled into distinct being in the 
mind of the forlorn deceiver, he recovered 
at once his fallen courage. One can hardly 
fail to see his eye kindle and his bosom swell 
as the accents fall from his lips : : — " The sword 
is the key of heaven and of hell." As he 
grasps its hilt, it becomes in his vision instinc- 
tive with his destiny. U A drop of blood shed 



THE SECRET OF MOHAMMED'S SUCCESS. 63 

in the cause of God, a night spent in arms, is 
of more avail than two months of fasting and 
prayer." The gulf that had opened its smould- 
ering chasm at his feet is thus passed at a 
single bound. "Mohammed had now a dream 
that he held in his hand the key of the Kaaba, 
and that he and his men made the circuit 
round it and performed all the ceremonies of 
the pilgrimage. Having told his dream next 
morning, he and his followers were all in high 
spirits upon it, taking it for an omen that 
they should shortly be masters of Mecca."* 

In commemoration of this dream of the key, 
the Andalusian Moors suspended one on the 
arch of their Alhambra, and bore the sign of 
one painted on their standards. He had now 
found out the secret of power. He grasped the 
key; the bolt yielded to its magic touch; the 
obstruction gave way amid the successive 
shocks of a great social revolution. He drew 
his sword to enforce his creed. The idolaters 
resisted. Three hundred and thirteen armed 
fanatics were all that supported his infant em- 
pire. Undismayed by superior numbers, though 
in peril of his life, his companions overpowered 
and falling around him, he is nevertheless 

*Ockley, p. 46 : 5th London edition, (Bohn ; ) 1848. 



64 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

equal to the terrible exigency. Springing to 
the back of his white mule, he rallies his fol- 
lowers, rushes upon his foes, and, in imitation 
of the ancient prophets, casts dust in their 
faces. Superstition now comes to his aid : it 
oppresses his enemies. They fly in their turn ; 
and, in the very moment of defeat, the impostor 
is suddenly victorious, and that almost without 
striking another blow. Amia, a surviving 
idolater, when pointed to the pit at Beder in 
which Mohammed had cast the bodies of his 
fallen foes, uttered the death-wail of Arabian 
paganism. The courage of the lonely chief 
spent itself in pathetic lamentation rather than 
in an appeal to the sword :— 

" Alas ! the peers and princes of the people, — 
How fallen at Beder and at Kandali ! 
All night exposed lie there both old and young, 
Naked and breathless. 

Oh, what a change has come to Mecca's vale ! 
Even sandy desert plains are drown' d in tears."* 

But larger armies rally; marches and 
countermarches, battles and sieges, follow 
each other in quick succession. The alarm of 
war falls back deep into the interior ; dusky 
warriors rush up from their wild retreats ; ten 

Ockley, p. 35. 



THE SECRET OF MOHAMMED'S SUCCESS. 65 

thousand watch-fires glimmer at the siege of 
Mecca. The idolaters are everywhere routed. 
The lieutenants of Mohammed spread his sway 
from the Gulf of Persia to the Ked Sea. The 
idols are destroyed, the altars of superstition 
demolished ; and, amid the crash of arms and the 
cloud of battle that settled dark over the 
bosom of the desert, the false prophet esta- 
blished his creed and stood at the head of an 
army of devotees, the conqueror of Arabia, the 
founder of a new kingdom, the author and 
propagator of a new faith. 

Surrounding nations did not understand the 
nature of that fierce domestic war that shook 
the depth of the wilderness with the tramp of 
camels and horses, and that skirted the horizon 
with its long lines of tents and camp-fires. All 
was indistinct; Mohammed, his creed, his as- 
sault upon the religion of his native land, all 
were invisible to the distant beholder at the 
time. The signs of tumult and of war, the pro- 
gress of a great and destructive conflict sweep- 
ing over the entire peninsula, — this was visible, 
but visible only as it stood alone, without ex- 
planation of its causes and aims, — visible, "as 
the smoke of a great furnace" rising from the 
bosom of the desert. 

6* 



CHAPTER VIII. 

ISLAMISM A PERVERSION OF CHRISTIANITY. 

"A king, .... understanding dark sentences, shall stand up." 
Dan. viii. 23 

Throughout the Koran, in maintaining the 
unity of God, Mohammed in almost every 
chapter assails the divinity of Christ. While 
he insists, in his opposition to the Jews, that 
Jesus was not an impostor, and holds them to 
a terrible account for what he declares to have 
been an abortive attempt to put him to death, 
he also insists, with a still greater earnestness 
and frequency, that he was a mere man, though 
a prophet, and that to maintain that he was 
the Son, companion, or equal of God, deserved 
not only death but the everlasting torments of 
hell. He makes himself our Lord's equal, if 
not his superior, and turns his promise of an- 
other comforter into a prediction that relates 
to himself. He sets aside necessarily the ex- 
piatory nature of the crucifixion, inasmuch as 
he denies the fact ; asserting that our Lord was 

66 



ISLAMISM A PERVERSION OF CHRISTIANITY. 67 

not crucified at all, the Jews having mistaken 
another for him. While, in the apprehensions 
of his unenlightened mind, the divine unity 
seemed ever in conflict with his deity and lord- 
ship, his actual crucifixion detracted also largely 
from his glory as a prophet. Nor does it ap- 
pear ever to have occurred to him that the 
deity of Christ could possibly be held by any 
one who did not of necessity at the same time 
repudiate the favourite dogma of his creed. He 
therefore doomed all who held it to the sword 
and to the flames. His grand idea not only 
threw up a black cloud upon the face of the 
sun; it also obscured the whole atmosphere of 
truth. He maintained that the Koran came 
from heaven and was sent down for the con- 
firmation of the Scriptures and for their true 
and ultimate interpretation. 

The sun and the air are in this prophecy 
representative terms. Their obscuration pro- 
ceeds from the well-known source of oppo- 
sition to things heavenly and divine. Christ 
is the Sun of righteousness and the glory of 
revealed religion. The Holy Scriptures, which 
contain and exhibit him, are the atmosphere 
illuminated by him. And, as the " dark sen- 
tences" of Hara confused and perverted their 
testimony, they were represented as the in- 



68 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

ventions of infernal malevolence, the smoke 
of the bottomless pit. The Koran is a re- 
production of many of the facts contained in 
Moses and in the Evangelists, but so modified 
as to suit the sinister purposes of the im- 
postor. Everywhere the unity of God is as- 
serted and idolatry condemned. Even Jesus 
is made to deny that he ever taught his 
own divinity or ever authorized the divine 
honours paid to him. And Noah, Abraham, 
Moses, and David, are all brought up as wit- 
nesses, and each one in his turn is made to 
testify to the divine unity and to endorse the 
mission of the prophet of Mecca. As he had 
no miracles to fall back upon, he thus fell back 
upon the authorit}^ of those who had, and, in 
this manner, with a consummate artfulness, 
turned the sacred books of both Jews and 
Christians into witnesses to the truth of his 
own dogma. 

It is thus that the sun and the air are 
darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. 
A room is darkened when you put out the 
candle; a city, when you turn off its light; but 
if a black pall be hung on the face of the sun 
the whole world is darkened. Though the ex- 
istence and the unity of God are assumed and 
taught in the Scriptures, as they are also in the 



ISLAMISM A PERVERSION OF CHRISTIANITY. G9 

whole universe of material things, yet the grand 
idea that ever occurs and that ever lights up 
and adorns the sacred page is that of atone- 
ment. When sin had entered the world and 
Eden and hope were lost, embodied in the first 
promise, it whispered comfort to the race and 
broke the silence of despair. And from this 
blessed hour it began to unfold and expand 
and impress itself on human convictions. 

It glimmered in sacrificial fires, for ages, over 
whole countries and from a thousand altars. 
From the exodus to the crucifixion, it shed 
upon Mount Zion the never-ceasing sacrifice 
of blood. It reflected its significance and its 
remedial glory from all the incidents of the in- 
spired history, — in Noah's ark, the offering of 
Isaac, the brazen serpent, the falling manna, 
the smitten rock. The high-priest, the gar- 
ments that he wore, and the ritual that regu- 
lated and directed his mediations, were its 
" image and superscription." The tabernacle, 
the temple, the lamb, the scape-goat, the altar, 
the mercy-seat, all, all were shadows of Him 
who by one offering should forever perfect all 
them that are sanctified. He was the grand 
basis of the everlasting covenant; and when 
those holy bards, inspired to sing of things 
divine, rose to the loftiest range of thought and 



70 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

melody, it was "when they saw his glory and 
spake of him." "To him gave all the pro- 
phets witness." His death and resurrection, 
his love, his conquests, his mediatorial reign 
and work, permeate the pages of the Old Testa- 
ment. In the New, the four Evangelists fur- 
nish us with his biography; the Acts of the 
Apostles, with the testimony of the Spirit to 
his mission of mercy. The Epistles contain a 
formal statement and defence of the expiatory 
nature of his sacrifice and intercession, and, from 
first to last, the sum of the inspired utterance 
is that of atonement made, a ransom found, a 
remedy provided, a Messiah offered up, a high- 
priest passed into the heavens, — Jesus, the Son 
of God, able to save to the uttermost, seeing he 
ever liveth to make intercession. 

Take this away, and, while the idea of the 
divine unity would still stand impressed on 
the sacred page as it does on the face of na- 
ture, yet there would be there no recorded 
hope for lost man; its lustre would be tar- 
nished, its harmony and its benediction lost. 
While it preached to me most incoherently 
of unity and purity, it would present to my 
wistful search no Eedeemer, and leave me in 
despair. It is thus that the glory of our Lord 
is obscured by the effusions of Hara. He is 



ISLAMISM A PERVERSION OF CHRISTIANITY. 71 

not indeed denied a place in the prophetic 
galaxy, but he is denied to have been the Son 
of God in his incarnation, and an expiatory 
sacrifice in his crucifixion. The Scriptures are 
in like manner not denied, but professedly con- 
firmed, by the Koran, while throughout their 
entire and illustrious testimony hell spreads 
out her torn cloud, intercepting the rays of the 
Sun of righteousness and hanging an atmo- 
sphere heavy and dark between earth and 
heaven. Ah me! thou blessed apostle of 
Jesus ! that were indeed the smoke of a pan- 
demon furnace that could thus throw a shadow 
on the glory of our Lord and obscure the efful- 
gence of his word. t 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE SARACENS — THEIR FANATIC COURAGE. 



And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth." — 
Rev. ix. 3. 



An obvious truth — a truth lying at the 
foundation of all enlightened conviction and 
worship- — formed the basis for the errors of 
the superstructure in the religion of the false 
prophet. All attempts to refute the dogma — 
a dogma made prominent in every ground of 
invasion or treaty of peace, in every orison or 
battle-cry — were ever a failure. It challenged 
the assent of Jew and Gentile as to an in- 
tuitive truth that carried with it its own evi- 
dence, and that imposed on all the obligations 
of an unhesitating faith. Joshua had waved 
the sword of doom over Canaan for denying 
it ; and Arabia, it was now affirmed, was called 
upon, by the last and the most illustrious of 
heaven's prophetic missionaries, to maintain in 
the earth u the worship of one sole and mighty 
God." The truth contained in the creed made 

72 



THE SARACENS — THEIR FANATIC COURAGE. 73 

the error respectable; the error made war a 
duty; and the rewards of booty and of para- 
dise made the unitarian army destructive and 
terrible, if not invincible. 

"And there came out of the smoke locusts 
upon the earth." 

"I swear/' said the impostor, "by the moun- 
tain upon which God spake to Moses, by what 
is contained in the book written in parchment, 
by the first temple of Mecca, by the arches of 
the heavens, and by the sea full of water, 
that God is one sole God, and the punishment 

promised to unbelievers is infallible 

They shall be precipitated in the fire of 

hell Who are the more happy? — they 

who are in our felicity, or such as are near to 
Zacon, the tree of hell? This tree cometh 
out of the bottom of hell ; it riseth high, and 
the branches themselves resemble the heads of 
devils. The damned shall eat the fruit thereof. 

They shall drink boiling water The 

fruit of the tree of hell, called Zacon, shall 
serve for fruit to the wicked. It shall boil in 
their bellies like pitch or water. They shall 
cry, 'Take the wicked; drag them into the 
fire of hell ! pour upon their heads all manner 
of torments!' It shall be said to them, 
'Taste the pains of hell!' .... The righteous 



/4 ISllMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

shall be in delicious places, in gardens adorned 
with fountains. They shall be clothed with 
purple. They shall behold each other nice to 
lace. We will assemble them with women 
pure and clean, who shall have most beautiful 
eyes. They shall have fruits savoury and de- 
licious, of all seasons. They shall never die. 
.... They shall be clothed with silk, repose 
on stately beds, and shall not be troubled 
either with the heat of the sun or the cold of 
the moon. They shall be under the shadow 
of the trees of paradise. There shall they 
gather fruits as they stand, sit, or lie 

down Whoever falls in battle, his 

sins are forgiven him : at the day of judg- 
ment his wounds shall be odoriferous as musk, 
and the loss of his limbs shall be supplied 
by the wings of the cherubim." Such mo- 
tives engendered in the warm climate and in 
the warm constitutions of the Arabs a fana- 
tic and a voluptuous zeal, that sent them in 
swarms from their barren and burning sands 
to ravage and lay Avaste the fair provinces of 
Christendom. 

When Syria had fallen, and Africa had 
been spoiled, and the Atlantic coast had been 
teached,' it is said that "Akbah spurred his 
horse into the -waves/ and, raising his eyesto 



THE SARACENS — THEIR FANATIC COURAGE. 75 

heaven, exclaimed, ' Great God ! if my course 
were not stopped by this sea, I would still go 
on to the unknown kingdoms of the West, 
preaching the unity of thy holy name, and 
putting to the sword the rebellious nations 
who worship any other gods but thee !' "* 

The emotion of Akbah was common to 
the masses composing the Saracenic armies. 
The woes of hell and the blessings of a sen- 
sual paradise were alike motives of amazing 
power, drawn from the invisible world, to in- 
duce the lover of war and plunder to follow 
the martial seer and his lieutenants. 

Both worlds were given to the faithful Mos- 
lem soldier. The spoils of war were his; fair 
castles, gardens, and conquered provinces, were 
the just possessions of the successful. If they 
fell in battle, they rose at once to their sensual 
rewards. Silver goblets, fastened on diamonds 
rilled from wine-bottles never before opened, 
and mingled with the water that sparkles 
in the fountains where the cherubim drink, 
should slake their thirst, without danger of 
satiety or inebriation. Beautiful black-eyed 
virgins, with skin as white as polished pearls, 
should become their wives. Keposing on ele- 

* Oekley, p. 366 : Bolin,- 5th Ed. 



76 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH 

vated beds, amid verdant fields, gardens, and 
fountains of exquisite beauty, and bordered 
by rivers that refresh and flow forever, the 
sufferer should find the compensations for 
courage and for death in the field of battle. 
Motives such as these, presented to a race so 
ardent and impulsive, kindled the wildest en- 
thusiasm, and vast hordes rose from their soli- 
tudes and followed each other on the bloody 
trail of war and carnage. 

Ethiopia and Arabia are alike the prolific 
home of the locust. They darken the air in 
their flight, create a rushing sound with their 
wings, like distant thunder, and cover a fron- 
tier, it is said, sometimes of five hundred miles. 
" This plague," says Pliny, " is considered a 
manifestation of the wrath of the gods. By 
their numbers they darken the sun, and the 
nations view them with anxious surprise. 
Their strength is unfailing, so that they cross 
oceans and pervade immense tracts of land. 
They cover the harvests with a dreadful cloud, 
their very touch destroying the fruits of the 
earth, and their bite utterly consuming every 
thing." 

"The quantity," says Volney, "of these in- 
sects is incredible to all who have not them- 
selves witnessed their astonishing numbers. 



THE SARACENS — THEIR FANATIC COURAGE. 77 

The whole earth is covered with them for the 
space of several leagues. The noise they 
make in browsing on the trees may be heard 
at a great distance. The Tartars themselves 
are less destructive than these little animals. 
One would imagine that fire had followed their 
progress. Wherever their myriads spread, the 
verdure of the country disappears; trees and 
plants stripped of their leaves give the appear- 
ance of winter to the spring. "When clouds 
of them take their flight, the heavens are lite- 
rally obscured by them." 

" The land is as the garden of Eden before 
them, and behind them as a desolate wilderness, 
yea, and nothing shall escape them. The ap- 
pearance of them is as the appearance of horses.* 
.... Like the noise of chariots on the tops of 
the mountains ; . . . like the noise of a flame 
of fire that devoureth the stubble; as a strong 
people set in battle array. . . . The earth shall 
quake before them, the heavens shall tremble, 
the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the 

stars shall withdraw their shining The 

Lord shall utter his voice before his army. . . . 



* "Its head is of the size of a pea, though longer, — its 
forehead pointing downward, like the handsome Andalusian 
horse." — Dillon's Travels 



tb ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

His camp is very great."* Saracenic armies, 
issuing from the home of the locust, and like 
them in number and destructiveness and in 
many other respects, are said by the prophet, 
metonymically, to be those insects just rising 
up in their appalling migrations. 

The ungrateful soil of the Arab returned 
him no remuneration for his labour. His camel 
or horse, his tent and scimitar, constituted his 
wealth and his resources. Always on the 
alert, ever armed, governed by no law but his 
will, his interest, or his impulses, his conscience 
and his understanding uninstructed, his saga- 
city and his emotional nature alone strongly 
developed, he must be ranked just where he 
has ever been, — with the most impressible of 
the human race. A verdant field, a flowing 
river, the shadows of trees, pendent fruit of a 
most delicious flavour, women of extraordinary 
beauty, a paradise of voluptuous ecstasies; — 
the ever-recurring imagery of the Koran,f were 
the appropriate excitements of his imaginative 
being, the prolific sources of fanatic courage 
and religious delusion. 

In that hotbed of cruelty and lust over 

* Joel ii. 
• fDe Ryer's Koran, ch. lxxxiii. to ch. lxxxviii., inclusive. 



THE SARACENS — THEIR FANATIC COURAGE. 79 

which the impostor held sway, the effusions of 
Hara had become an incubation of intense 
activity, as they settled on its bosom and 
invited its slumbering myriads into aggressive 
life. Never did an army more effective, of 
a more destructive and irresistible fanaticism, 
rise at the conjurations of a wily magician, or 
evolve from the dark creations of a heated 
imagination. 

A turban, unfurled and suspended for a 
banner from the point of Boreida's spear, w^hen 
the forlorn prophet entered Medina, made the 
yellow head-dress ever after the distinguishing 
badge of his Saracenic disciples.* It became 
the ornament and golden crown of Moslem 
soldiers. Their long black tresses escaping 
from underneath its graceful folds, their loose 
and flowing robes, often ornamented with rib- 
bons and rich silks, (the spoils of war,) gave 
to these conquerors of the world, when seen in 
the distance, the appearance of an army of 
women. But John's nearer view of them cor- 
rected first and false impressions : they had the 
faces of men; they were armed for war. u Their 
physical structure is in all respects more per- 
fect than that of Europeans, their organs of 

* The Turks wear white ones. 



80 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

sense exquisitely acute, their size above the 
average of men in general, their figure robust 
and elegant."* 

Their neatly-fitting breastplates were worn 
not for ornament but for use. With eyes deep- 
set, overshadowed by shaggy eyebrows and 
supported by high cheek-bones, with mouths 
large, teeth prominent and carnivorous, — in a 
word, in their whole aspect, — the animal pre- 
dominated over the man. Their look was 
appalling; their battle-cry, accompanying the 
charge of their rushing squadrons, loud and 
courageous; their onset irresistible. It was 
" as the sound of chariots of many horses run- 
ning to battle." 

Nothing truly peculiar and strikingly cha- 
racteristic of the Moslem invaders escaped 
the vision of John.-)* The compact infantry of 
the Eomans was not before him in this pano- 
rama. These strange soldiers were mounted, 
and rushed on their mission of wo in the 
saddle. The camel, at the first in more gene- 
ral use among the poorer classes of the Mo- 
hammedans, soon gave place to the horse, — 

* Baron De Larrey, surgeon-general of Napoleon's army 
in Egypt. 

f Rev. ix. 7-9. 



THE SARACENS — THEIR FANATIC COURAGE. 81 

the native and the favourite of Yemen and 
the main dependence of Saracenic armies. 
Encumbered by no baggage, quartering, like 
the locust, on newly-appropriated districts, con- 
tinued enterprises of war were undertaken at a 
moment's warning, and distant cities, assured 
of safety from their very remoteness from 
the scenes of late invasions and disasters, were 
themselves suddenly stricken and oppressed. 
The first intimation of danger arose usually from 
the actual perception of its immediate vicinity. 
At break of day there is perceived an unusual 
rush, as of winds, or commotions in the air, 
or as of a prolonged, undulating sound, a low 
tremulous thunder, in the earth. It reaches 
the ear of the sentinel on the walls, of the 
citizen in the gate, of the mother at her cradle, 
of the bride at her toilet. It is the hostile 
camp just put in motion; it is the tramp of a 
hundred thousand horse. Every eye is now 
directed toward the unprotected and invaded 
frontier. A long waving line skirts the hori- 
zon ; it rises higher and darker, like a cloud of 
locusts just taking wing in myriads from the 
bosom of the desert. It is the dust from the 
feet of the Moslem cavalry 



CHAPTER X. 

MOHAMMED AND HIS SUCCESSORS. 

" Earth seems a garden in its loveliest dress 
Before them, and behind a wilderness." 

Cowper. 

We shall now take our leave of the false 
prophet, to follow those that succeeded to his 
bloody throne and spread his martial and his 
ghostly dominion. Mohammed at his death 
ceased from being an actor in the scenes that 
originated from the effusions of the pit. He 
sent out its smoke, put in motion those im- 
portant social convulsions and changes which 
ended in the establishment of his faith and of 
his government, subverted the idolatry and 
independence of his native country, and then 
disappeared forever. 

The army that had sprung up around him 
gave to his " dark sentences" a more compre- 
hensive meaning, a wider range, than suited 
the timidity of old age or the imbecility inci- 
dent to the poison he had imbibed three years 
before. 

32 



MOHAMMED AND HIS SUCCESSORS. 83 

"After his return to Medina from his late 
pilgrimage," says Prideaux, (pages 87—89.) "he 
began daily to decline through the force of 
that poison which he had taken three years 
before at Kaabar, which, still working in him, 
at length brought him so low as forced him, on 
the 28th day of Saphar, (the second month of 
the year,) to take his bed ; and on the twelfth 
day of the following month he died, after 
having been sick thirteen days 

" The beginning of his sickness was a slow 
fever, which at length made him delirious; 
whereon he called for a pen, ink, and paper, 
telling them that he would dictate a book to 
them which should keep them from erring after 

his death During his sickness he much 

complained of the bit* which he had taken at 
Kaabar, telling those that came to visit him 
that he had felt the torments of it hi his body 
ever since; that at times it brought on him 
very dolorous pains, and that then it was going 
to break his very heart-strings. And when, 
among others, there came to see him the mother 
of Bashar, who died on the spot of that poison, 
he cried out, ' mother of Bashar, the veins 
of my heart are now breaking of the bit which 

* Meat poisoned by a female. 



84 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

I eat with your son at Kaabar.' .... Some of 
his followers would have had him buried at 
Mecca, some at Jerusalem, others at Medina. 
Abu Beker, coming in, told them that he had 
often heard from the prophet himself that 
prophets were to be buried in the place where 
they died ; and then, without more ado, com- 
manded the bed whereon he lay to be plucked 
out, and a grave to be immediately dug under 
it, to which all consented; and there they 
buried him forthwith, in the place where he 
died, which was in the chamber of Ayesha, 
his best-beloved wife, at Medina ; and there he 
lieth to this day, without an iron coffin or 
loadstones to hang him in the air, as the 
stories which commonly go about of him 
among Christians fabulously relate." 

The name of an unholy ambition, in any 
event, had spent itself in the frame which it 
had excited and consumed. He had become 
weary of long marches and sieges, of exposures 
and privations. The prospects of distant and 
dangerous campaigns filled the prematurely 
old and infirm pretender with pacific inten- 
tions. His councils were now shaped to re- 
press the ardour of his followers. But the 
locust horde had already taken wing, — had in- 
herited a destructive nature with all the energy 



MOHAMMED AND HIS SUCCESSORS. 85 

of its young and ungratified propensities ; and 
scarcely had his body sunk to its last resting- 
place in the earth, underneath the bedchamber 
of Ayesha, in Medina, a.d. 632,* when the 
bloody drama which his inventive genius had 
prepared was opened in Asia by his fierce lieu- 
tenants. The world, through other leaders, 
felt the shock of his now palsied arm. 

" The evil that men do lives after them." 
Mohammed, like his famed progenitor, had 
left a sad legacy to the world. Both stand 
out by themselves in a solitary and gloomy 
grandeur of nature, with the awful capabilities 
of impressing their ruinous individualities on 
the men of their own times and of making 
their own deep footprints the highway of 
after-generations. 

The caliphs gave perpetuity to a creed 
which they embraced with sincere and fanatic 
zeal, snatched from the failing grasp of their 
dying prophet the whip of scorpions, and be- 
came in their turn the propagandists of his 

* Mohammed was evidently delirious at his death. His 
call for materials to write a new book just before he 
breathed his last is in evidence of this ; and his last words, 
"0 God, pardon my sins! yes, I come among my fellow- 
citizens on high!" should not be put down as evidence of 
his sincerity, but of mental aberration. 
8 



86 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

imposture and the scourge of the world. In 
the first great battle of the Moslems with a 
foreign foe at Muta, " Zeid fell like a soldier 
in the foremost ranks. The death of Jaafar 
was heroic and memorable. He lost his 
right hand; he shifted the standard to his 
left. The left was severed from his body; 
he embraced the standard with his bleeding 
stumps till he was transfixed to the ground 
with fifty honourable wounds. ' Advance !' 
cried Abdallah, who stepped into the vacant 
place ; ' either victory or paradise is our own !' 
The lance of a Eoman decided the alternative ; 
but the falling standard was rescued by Caled, 
the proselyte of Mecca; nine swords were 
broken in his hands, and his valour withstood 
and repulsed the superior number of the 
Christians. 

"Caled is renowned among his brethren and 
his enemies by the glorious appellation of 
the sword of God"* His shout was louder 
than that of Mohammed, his agility and his 
strength that of the tiger,-)- his cruelty as un- 

* Gibbon, vol. v. p. 141. 

•J- "While he was fighting with one of the Greeks, his 
sword broke in his hand; but, closing with his adversary, he 
squeezed him so hard that he broke his ribs and then threw 
him down dead from off his horse. '* ; ~Oc&%, p. 193. 



MOHAMMED AND HIS SUCCESSORS. 87 



relenting. Over his head waved the stand- 
ard of the black eagle; and his battle-cry, as 
he rushed to his banquet of blood, sent a thrill 
of terror to the hearts of the brave. 

When he led his troops into Damascus, his 
ears were deaf to the supplications of the con- 
quered. The bitter wail that rose around him 
was drowned by his voice. It thundered along 
the crowded street, lined with murderers : — 
" No quarters to the unbelievers ! no quarters !" 
Obeidah had entered the town at another point 
and had granted the prayer of the trembling 
Damascenes ; midway met the rival chiefs and 
the tides of war and peace. The enraged Caled 
claimed that Obeidah's grant was invalid and 
an invasion of privilege. " The unbelievers," 
shouted the gaunt murderer, " shall perish by 
the sword! Fall on !"* 

When Caled became a proselyte, he was com- 
missioned by Mohammed to destroy the re- 
maining idols of Arabia. His cruelty to the 
Jodhamites shocked even the remorseless pro- 
phet himself. For, after many were taken 
prisoners, he tied the hands of numbers behind 
their backs and put them all to the sword.-)* 

Before his death he was charged with em- 

* Mil. Gib. ch. 51. f Ockley, p. 55. 



88 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

bezzlement. "An examination was accord- 
ingly instituted, with every indignity, and his 
turban fastened round his neck in the igno- 
minious grasp of the common crier. . . . The 
imposition of a fine satisfied the public justice ; 
but when his horse, his armour, and one slave, 
w r ere found to constitute all his wealth, Omar 
deigned to weep over the tomb, at Emesa, of 
the injured conqueror of Syria."* Such were 
the fierce whelps that howled for the prey as 
soon as their leashes were dropped by the de- 
parted Mohammed. Mischief was afoot, and 
its inevitable march was down the waste of 
years. 

* Major Pierce, in note to Ockley, p. 255 



CHAPTER XL 



THE SARACENS, A SCOURGE TO CHRISTENDOM. 



" Their torment was as the torment of a scorpion when he 
Btriketh a man." — Rev. ix. 5. 



The locust, though destructive to vegetation, 
is not malignant in its disposition or poisonous 
in its bite or sting. It became necessary, 
therefore, as inspiration would represent the 
true character of the woe, to introduce into 
the description of it another insect or reptile 
common to the torrid zone, and of extra- 
ordinary and deadly irascibility. Said the 
prophet, "And they had tails like unto 
scorpions, and they had stings in their tails. 
Their torment was as the torment of a scor- 
pion when he strike th a man." 

The sting of a scorpion is a sharp-pointed 
downward curve at the end of his tail; and, 
when excited, he raises it and inflicts a deadly 
wound. The stroke is sudden and without 
warning. The poison — a cold, colourless fluid 
— oozes out with either the exertion or pres- 

8* F 89 



90 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

sure attending the stroke, or both, combined, 
and is left in the incision made. It is very 
diffusive. It is taken up at once into the cir- 
culation, and assimilates in a very short time 
the whole mass of the fluids, the wound itself 
remaining but slightly inflamed. 

Such was the venom of that spiritual poison 
in the creed of the false prophet. It was 
left behind in every conquered country, to 
assimilate every thing to its own nature. Its 
stealthy approach was unobserved, like that 
of the scorpion in the footpath, until it, or 
the resistless stroke of the scimitar, or a life 
of bondage, became the alternatives to be at 
once chosen, and that without debate. Many 
chose death; and torrents of Christian blood 
were rained upon the pavements of fallen 
cities. Many chose to pay tribute, and to drag 
out a sickly being under heavy exactions and 
most destructive religious prohibitions. Others 
chose at once to imbibe the poison and to pur- 
chase social and political equality among their 
conquerors by an open and shameless apostasy. 

Said Romanus, the fallen governor of Boz- 
rah, " I renounce your society, both in this 
world and in the world to come ; and I deny 
Him that was crucified and whosoever wor- 
ships him; and I choose God for my Lord, 



THE SABACENSj A SCOURGE. 91 

Islam for my faith, Mecca for my temple, the 
Moslem for my brethren, and Mohammed for 
my prophet, who was sent to lead men into 
the right way and to exalt the true religion in 
spite of all those who join partners with God."* 

A venerable Greek, issuing on one occasion 
from an army of seventy thousand Christians, 
offered presents and terms of peace to the in- 
vader of Syria; but Caled's reply was, "Ye 
Christian dogs ! ye know your option. The 
Koran, the tribute, or the sword /'f 

When the Moslems sat down before the 
gates of a besieged Christian city, the sum- 
mons to surrender ran usually in the following 
terms : — " We require you to testify that there 
is but one God, and that Mohammed is the 
prophet of God." 

" In the name of the most merciful God. 
From Abu Obeidah Ebn Aljirahh to the chief 
commanders of the people of iEliahJ and the 
inhabitants thereof. Health and happiness 
to every one that follows the right way and 
believes in God and the apostle. We require 
of you to testify that there is but one God, and 
Mohammed is his apostle, and that there shall 

* Gibbon, vol. v. p. 192. 

| Ibid. p. 195. J Jerusalem. 



92 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

be a day of judgment when God shall raise 
the dead out of their sepulchres; and when 
you have borne witness to this, it is unlawful 
for us either to shed your blood or meddle with 
your substance or children. If you refuse this, 
consent to pay tribute and be under us forth- 
with; otherwise I shall bring men against you 
who love death better than you do the drink- 
ing of wine or eating of hogs' flesh ; nor will I 
ever stir from you, if it please God, till I have 
destroyed those that fight for you and made 
slaves of your children."* 

Those who consented to these terms im- 
bibed the poison of a false faith in its dead- 
liest form. That was a scorpion-sting indeed, 
which penetrated to the very soul, corrupted 
the blood of an immortal nature, and brought 
on the endless horrors of the second death. 
He who embraced that creed perished ; for he 
sinned against the remedy itself: and what sin 
could be more mortal? For, though he ex- 
alted God in his unity, he in the next breath 
degraded him in his Son. This was the sting 
in the tail, — the venom of the scorpion left 
behind; and this was it that was ever de- 
manded, while the scimitar, dripping with gore, 

* Ockley, p. 206 



THE *SARACENS, A SCOURGE. 93 

waved over the head of the fallen disciple. It 
was the deadliest sting in the Saracenic woe. 

The stroke of the scorpion, though gene- 
rally, was not uniformly, fatal; perhaps be- 
cause its most concentrated venom failed to 
be always ejected into the wound. Those that 
survived, however, lost their vigour and viva- 
city, and sank to an early grave from the 
effects of the poison, — a true and sad picture 
of an expiring Christianity consuming away 
under Mohammedan exactions, prohibitions, 
and influences. The masses of those who 
purchased life and toleration by paying tri- 
bute were gradually either absorbed and lost 
to the church in an amalgamation with the 
social and religious habits of their conquerors, 
or were led in despair to emigrate to distant 
lands. The vast regions that stretch from 
India across Asia and Africa to the Atlantic, 
and a part of Europe, became Mohammedan 
countries. Over all these fair Christian pro- 
vinces the scorpion made his disgusting trail 
and left everywhere his deadly venom. Those 
who were not at once destroyed were doomed 
to experience a torment, to fall into a despond- 
ency and a despair, like to that which the scor- 
pion diffuses through life's wasting fountains 
"when it striketh a man." 



94 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

It is of all reptiles the most irascible and 
destructive. Shut up under a glass with the 
mouse, the spider, — yea, with even its own 
kind, — it will at once commence a deadly feud 
with all, and will fight till it destroy or be 
destroyed. A female, it is related, killed all 
its offspring successively but one. That one, 
more vigorous than the rest, sprung upon the 
back of its unnatural mother and stung her 
to death. It is said that, when highly exas- 
perated, the undaunted suicide will kill itself 
with the stroke of its own tail. 

Such traits are remarkably illustrative of 
the irascible and destructive dispositions of 
the descendants of Ishmael as they appeared 
prior to the advent of Mohammed among them. 
They have since then been put under a reli- 
gious discipline which restrains their tendency 
to kill one another. Their animosities are no 
longer optional and impulsive, but organized and 
obligatory. The Koran pours its venom round 
the Moslem's heart, and makes its outworkings 
toward all others but the ordinary evidences 
of his religious sincerity. It requires that no 
debate be had with unbelievers; that all gain- 
saying should be ended at once by the thrust 
of the spear or the sword. 

" Pray," said Omar, " mind what I say to 



THE SARACENS; A SCOURGE. 95 

you : if any man makes profession of our re- 
ligion, and then leaves it, we kill him."* 

Omar, in the course of an address, quoted 
this passage from the Koran: — "He whom 
God shall direct is led in the right way; but 
thou shalt not find a friend to direct him 
aright whom God shall lead into error." A 
Christian priest that sat before him stood up 
and said, " God leads no man into error," and 
repeated it. Omar said nothing to him, but 
bade those that stood by strike off his head if 
he should say so again. f 

While success attended the arms of the 
Saracens, they seem to have laid aside alto- 
gether their former domestic retaliations. Dis- 
appointment and defeat, however, rouses the 
latent fury of their nature still, and even the 
precepts of the Koran prove at such conjunc- 
tures an insufficient restraint. The finest army 
they ever marshalled, when partially defeated 
by Charles Martel, became enraged at the severe 
handling they were receiving from the heavy 
blows of the Normans, and, without any other 
assignable reason, cut each other in pieces. 

* Ockley, p. 209. f Ockley, pp. 210-11. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE SARACENS, A SCOURGE TO CHRISTENDOM. 
CONTINUED. 



And in those days shall men seek death and shall not find it; and 
shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them." — Rev. ix. 6. 



It is simply fanciful to interpret this of the 
fanatic Derar, and perhaps a very few others 
of the Moslems, who sought or seemed to court 
death for the purpose of joining at an earlier 
hour their black-eyed wives in paradise; since 
it is the intention of the Evangelist, obviously, 
to describe the woe as it was seen to affect 
those on whom it fell. 

"Oppression maketh a wise man mad;" but 
there are forms of it that tempt even to 
suicide. Among men of conscience and of 
courage, though at the same time destitute 
of true piety, the alternative of death was 
often sought in posts of danger and in fields 
of battle to avoid a constrained apostasy, a 
base submission, or the sight of domestic 
violation and dishonour. And even here, 

96 



THE SARACENS, A SCOURGE. 97 

amid falling and flying thousands, though 
covered with many wounds, death fled their 
eager embrace. And, as their religious princi- 
ples would not allow them to inflict a volun- 
tary death-stroke with their own hands upon 
themselves, they envied their more fortunate 
brethren-in-arms who had sought and who had 
obtained the gift to die. 

Sad indeed it was to hear the jackal growl 
and the raven croak in the fields of the slain; 
but sadder far to hear the Moslem shout as he 
bore away a wife or a daughter to his harem; 
to endure his look of scorn for holy things and 
holy ties ; to see his strong hand bear aloft the 
standard of the black eagle, plant it on Chris- 
tian battlements, and unfold and wave it in 
triumph over the broken crucifixes and tram- 
pled images of Jesus. Oh, the living madness 
of this form of the woe ! It was heaven's whip 
of scorpions, to torment before the time, in the 
visible church, those that repented not of their 
thefts, idolatries, and persecutions. 

How terrible was the doom of Babylon, and 
how signal as to the time and manner of its in- 
fliction ! In the sumptuous halls of its palace 
were gathered the impious revellers. The ves- 
sels of Jehovah's temple were brought forth, 
drink-offerings poured out; and all united in 

9 



98 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

praising the idols of silver and of gold. Sud- 
denly above their heads appeared the hand- 
writing on the wall; and, while princes and 
courtiers were seeking to define their terror and 
restore their courage, the battle-cry of Cyrus is 
heard : — " Awake, ye princes, and anoint the 
shield !" His soldiers rush through the opened 
gates, and the blood of the revellers is mingled 
with their sacrifices. Said the prophet, " It is 
the vengeance of the Lord, the vengeance of 
his temple." 

The Christian church, the vast visible temple 
of the Holy Ghost, was now again likewise 
profaned in the East and in the West, and God 
again went through it, armed with a whip of 
scorpions twisted long before and prepared to 
his hand, driving out thence the vile priest reek- 
ing with lust, blood, and simony, overturning 
the tables of the money-changers and trampling 
images and crucifixes underneath his burning 
feet. The Saracenic woe, destructive though it 
was, had a divine commission : "it was the 
vengeance of the Lord, the vengeance of his 
temple." 

"And in those days shall men seek death, 
and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, 
and death shall flee from them." 



CHAPTER XIII. 

MOHAMUED PROTECTING THE TRUE CHURCH: 
THE NESTORIANS. 

" They lived unknown 
Till persecution dragged them into fame 
And chased them up to heaven." 

Cowper ; Task, p. 763. 

The locusts were commanded to subsist on 
that which they were never known to select 
for food. How like the Arab (the bosom of 
whose deserts had from time immemorial been 
covered with idols) violating the cherished in- 
stincts of ages in making war upon the world's 
idolatry ! 

The locusts were also commanded not to 
hurt that which they were never known to 
spare. " It was commanded them that they 
should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither 
any green thing, neither any tree ; but only 
those men who have not the seal of God in 
their foreheads." Ishmaers animosities to true 
religion, ever natural and ever injurious both 
before the rise and after the fall of the empire 

99 



100 ISIIMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

of the caliphs, were, during its continuance, 
required to be put under most effectual re- 
straint. 

The Saracens were not to make war in any 
event upon the sealed. Wherever else the 
blight of their shadow might fall or the stroke 
of their vengeance smite, the living verdure 
must remain unharmed on the slopes of Zion, 
the olive flourish unmolested in the courts of 
the Lord, and no axe be. raised to fell the ever- 
greens that waved over Lebanon. 

The exception is comprehensive and dis- 
criminative. It includes each organized fra- 
ternity of true believers. These were as con- 
spicuous for their purifying and. persevering 
testimony as were the image-worshippers for 
their impiety, whose degenerate Christianity 
they rejected and. whose oppressions they bore. 
IT was the seal that heaven had placed on 
their open and manly brow. To point them 
out, to vindicate their injured fame, and to 
trace their progress and preservation under 
this most singular protectorate, will be made 
the agreeable toil of a passing hour. 

The worship of the Virgin Mary is not only 
deeply rooted in the Greek and Latin sects, but 
it was the earliest form and evidence of their 
apostasy. By the true church Mary has ever 



TIIE NESTORIANS. 101 

been regarded as a subject of the fall, a sinner 
saved by grace, the mother of our Lord's human- 
ity, as probably the mother of other children,* 
and not properly as the mother of God or the 
proper object of religious veneration. 

In a.d. 428, the presbyter Anastasius pub- 
licly and earnestly condemned the title Oeoroxog, 
"mother of God," given to Mary. Xpigroxog, 
"mother of Christ," he insisted, was far more 
expressive of the truth on this point both in 
divinity and philosophy. Deity could not be 
born, and humanity alone could derive its 
being from a human parent. Nestorius de- 
fended these views ; and the controversy thus 
originated in Constantinople spread through- 
out the church. Numbers of the pious and 
the learned in Asia and Africa held and de- 
fended the same Scriptural views. 

Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, procured the 
calling of a council at Ephesus, a.d. 431, in 
which he presided, and, without waiting for 
the arrival of the Eastern bishops, or even the 
decencies of apparent justice, deprived Nesto- 
rius of his episcopate and banished him into 
a solitary place in the deserts of Egypt. Here 
he died, a.d. 435. Thus commenced the contro- 

* Matt. i. 25; Luke ii. 7. 
9* 



102 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

vers j and the persecution. But the Nestorians, 
with unbroken resolution, upheld the primitive 
faith, refused all divine honours to the Virgin, 
and were numerous and powerful throughout 
the East. 

Proscribed and persecuted by the Greeks 
and Latins, they penetrated the interior of 
Arabia, Transoxiana, and even China. Their 
sufferings inflamed their zeal and awakened 
the pity of savage breasts. 

The celebrated " Testament of Mohammed" 
is among the earliest productions of the Ara- 
bian prophet, and originated, it is believed, in 
his sympathy for them. If not written by his 
own hand, it is all the same to us in the pre- 
mises, since in the solemn convictions of the 
Saracens it was so written, did contain his 
signature and seal, and its provisions were con- 
sequently sacredly heeded and carried out by 
them. 

This extraordinary document secured to the 
Nestorians freedom from service in war, per- 
fect toleration of their customs and laws, ex- 
emption of their clergy from tribute, imposed a 
moderate tax on their people; and even their 
poor serving-maids employed in Mohammedan 
families were to be permitted to observe all the 
ceremonies or fasts enjoined by their church, 



THE NESTORIANS. 103 

and to have no restraint whatever put upon 
their Christian liberty. 

"As to this testament," says Maclane, "whe- 
ther it be genuine or spurious, it is certain that 
its contents were true, since many learned men 
have fully proved that the pseudo-prophet, at 
his first setting out, prohibited in the strongest 
manner the commission of all sorts of injuries 
against the Christians, and especially the Nes- 
torians."* The fall of Persia and of Asia into 
the hands of the Saracens procured therefore, 
for these persecuted disciples, privileges which 
they did not previously possess, and which 
they chronicle with pious gratitude. 

"Even the Arabs," writes Jesujabus, their 
patriarch, "on whom the Almighty has in 
these days bestowed the dominion of the earth, 
are among us, as thou knowest ; yet they do 
not persecute the Christian religion, but, on the 
contrary, they commend our faith and commend 
the priests and saints of the Lord, conferring 
benefits on his churches and convents."f 

"When the vicar of Mohammed had collected 
troops for the invasion of Syria, his language 
in his instructions to his lieutenants and army 
is in conformity with the provisions of this 

* Maclane' s note in Mosheim, vol. i. p. 183 
*j" Assemani, vol. iii. p. 131. 



104 ISHMAEL AND r UIE CHURCH. 

testament "Destroy no palm-trees nor 

burn any fields of corn; out down no fruit- 
trees nor do any mischief to cattle A B 

you go on you will find some religious persons 
who live retired in monasteries and propose 
to themselves to serve God in that way. Let 
them alone, and neither kill them nor destroy 
their monasteries. And you will find another 
sort of people, that belong to the synagogue of 
Satan, who have shaven crowns; be sure you 
cleave their skulls, and give them no quarter 
till they either turn Mohammedans or pay 
tribute."* 

Even as late as the seventh century the 
monasteries were occupied by laymen. They 
wore their hair long ; but when they became 
priests they shaved the hair from the top of 
their heads. 

The words used by the apostle and by the 
caliph are strikingly similar. It is as though, 
through the vista of years, and in the bosom 
of the desert. John had seen Abubeker ascend 
a hill, review his troops, and had heard and 
did but recite his very words, when he said, 
"It was commanded them that they should 
not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any 
green thing, neither any tree, but only those 

* Gibbon, vol. v. p. 1**. 



THE XESTOPJAXS. 105 

men that had not the seal of God in their 
foreheads." It \s as though he intended to 
select at least just so much of that remarkable 
charge to the Moslem army as should serve to 
identify it with the very woe to which he re- 
ferred, as protective with respect to the sealed, 
and as containing heaven's cup of trembling to 
image-wor s h ipper s . 

"When Heraclius, the emperor, expressed 
his astonishment at this extraordinary suc- 
cess of the Arabs, who were inferior to the 
Greeks both in number, strength, arms, and 
discipline, after a short silence, a grave man 
stood up and told him that the reason of it 
was that the Greeks had walked unworthily 
of their Christian profession, and changed their 
religion from what it was when Jesus Christ 
first delivered it to them, injuring and oppress- 
ing one another, taking usury, committing 
fornication, and fomenting all manner of strife 
and variance among themselves. And, indeed, 
the vices of these Christians were at that time 
so flagrant as to make them offensive to the 
very infidels, as confessed by the Greek writers 
themselves and exaggerated by the Arabic 
ones. The emperor answered, 'That he was 
too sensible of it.' "* 

.•kley, pp. 194, 196. 
G 



106 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

All the countries over which the Csesars 
bore sway, with but limited exceptions, had 
in the seventh century joined the general de- 
fection from Christ, and were regarded by the 
invaders as doomed to the sword, as Canaan 
had previously been to that of Joshua. The 
idols of a fallen paganism had revived every- 
where, as by enchantment, and, adorned with 
holy garments and gilded crosses and named 
after Jesus, Mary, the apostles and martyrs, 
were set up and worshipped in all the sanctu- 
aries of Christendom. Men with bare feet 
and shaven crowns conducted the idolatrous 
services of the people, and often bore the idols 
on the walls of besieged towns and along the 
lines of Christian armies, to inspire devotion 
and courage. Even in the recesses of the 
desert they were known as the priesthood of 
an apostate church, and are hence specifically 
designated by the indignant caliph as not the 
limit, but the butt, of the woe. 

The exception in favour of the refugees of the 
monasteries originated, doubtless, in the deep 
veneration felt for the testament of the Arabian 
prophet. When the battle raged around the 
monastery of the holy fathers, about thirty miles 
from Damascus, the monastery was spared; and 
the priest, though he treated with scorn the 



THE NESTORIANS. 107 

bloody Caled, was not slain. Said the chief, 
curbing his rage,* — "if the apostle of God, of 
blessed memory, had not commanded us to let 
such men as you alone, you should not have 
escaped any more than the rest, but I would 
have put you to a most cruel death." 

"The successors of Mohammed in Persia 
employed the Nestorians in the most important 
affairs both of the cabinet and of the pro- 
vinces, and suffered the patriarch of that sect 
alone to reside in the kingdom of Bagdad."* 
Under the caliphs, the Nestorians continued to 
flourish. From Persia to China their metro- 
politan sees dotted the whole interior of Eastern 
Asia. But when the Turks arose and intro- 
duced the second woe, they were brought under 
another sort of men, to whom it had not been 
said, "Hurt not the grass of the earth, neither 
any green thing, neither any tree, but only 
those men who have not the seal of God in 
their foreheads." It is not the divine purpose 
always to preserve his people from persecu- 
tion : their preservation, on the contrary, is an 
exception at any time to a general rule, a rule 
thus expressed: — "He that will live godly in 
Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution." Their 

* Ocklej, p. 168. ■(■ Assemani, p. 97. 



108 ISIIMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

preservation therefore under the caliphs, made 
prominent in prophecy and in history, gains 
thus the distinctness of a great event; is 
pointed out as "the white spot in the hide of 
the black camel," the oasis that for four cen- 
turies continued to smile amid Mohammedan 
desolations; and is beheld in the retrospec- 
tions of our own times as beautiful and me- 
morable. 

The Nestorians, it is quite evident also, had, 
at the period of the Turkish conquests in Asia, 
fallen from their first love; and their candle- 
stick, like that of the seven churches, could not 
in that event have retained its place. It is 
quite probable also that Providence, in nume- 
rous eclective processes, had already drawn the 
piety of declining Nestorianism into the higher 
purity of the Paulicians, and had effected its 
ultimate exodus through the Alps. 

With the decline of the caliphs the emigra- 
tion of the godly evidently set toward the 
West. The connecting link between the East 
and the West was formed by the Paulicians. 
Their churches were spread out on the western 
confines of Nestorianism, and fringed with 
light the eastern borders of the Greek empire. 
It will break the chain in our illustrations to 
omit a brief notice of this sect. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

MOHAMMED PROTECTING THE TRUE CnURCH : 
THE PAULICIANS. 

"The evil that men do lives after them; 
The good is oft interred with their bones." 

A deacon returning from captivity in Syria, 
A.d. 6G0, tarried for a night near Samosata 
with a man named Constantine. With him he 
left a copy of the New Testament. It to him 
became an invaluable treasure, the study and 
the rule of his life; his house and his heart 
the place of its sanctifying influence. The 
Paulicians, thus incidentally originated, suf- 
fered for one hundred and fifty years all the 
rigours of a most violent persecution. 

During all this period their patience failed 
not. Under the decree of the cruel empress 
Theodora, to say nothing of other persecutions, 
the army of their martyrs was numbered, by 
their foes, at a hundred thousand. The bleed- 
ing remnant, just at the point of total extermi- 
nation, fled for protection to the Moham- 
medans. Here they found pity and shelter, 

10 100 



110 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

liberty to build a city, and perfect religious tole- 
ration. And here also, in after-years, sprang 
up that alliance which enabled their exaspe- 
rated and valiant sons to win back again for a 
season their country and to make inquest for 
the blood of their injured and unresisting sires. 
Unable to ruin them, on account of their 
Saracenic resources, their transportation into 
the different countries of Europe became the 
settled policy of the emperors. Separated from 
their Asiatic friends, their conversion might 
perhaps be possible; or their burial in the 
silence of the grave the easier and the more cer- 
tain alternative. " Under the Byzantine stand- 
ards the Paulicians were often transported to 

the Greek provinces of Italy and Sicily 

Their opinions were silently propagated in 
Rome and in the kingdoms beyond the Alps. 
.... It was in the country of the Albigois, in 
the southern provinces of France, that the Pau- 
licians were most deeply implanted In 

the thirteenth century, the visible assemblies 
of the Paulicians were extirpated by fire and 

sword A confession of simple worship 

and blameless manners is extorted from their 
enemies."* 



* Gibbon, vol. v. pp. 397, 398. 



THE PAULICIAXS. Ill 

Previously to his conversion the father of 
the Paulicians was probably a Manichsean. 
This would lay a sufficient foundation for the 
most injurious imputations, — for charging upon 
him and his followers the worst forms of the 
repudiated error. The Manichaeans would also 
often be confounded with his followers by the 
persecutors, who would care but little by what 
name their victims were designated, so that it 
was at the same time sufficiently odious. One 
or two instances of this kind, taken up and art- 
fully managed two hundred years afterward, 
might easily be made to pass, among hasty 
compilers, for " the voice of all antiquity." 

Obloquy is Rome's best atonement for her 
murders, — the uniform sequel to every mas- 
sacre, the vile reservoir in which her drip- 
ping skirts have ever been washed from inno- 
cent blood. It is indeed difficult to defend 
those whose tongues and whose manuscripts 
have alike been dissolved and scattered in the 
ashes of the stake; but, "as they cannot plead 
for themselves, our candid criticism will mag- 
nify the good and abate or suspect the evil 
that is reported by their adversaries."* 

They were very tenacious of denominational 

* Gibbon, vol. v. p. 385. 



112 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

life, and maintained it until the tenth century, 
against the oppressions of force and the seduc- 
tions of flattery. Both were employed to ex- 
terminate or convert them; and both, during 
four centuries, though aided by the assiduities 
of an empire, proved unavailing. At the end 
of this period, having been transported, they 
became absorbed among the churches of the 
Alps. This easy transition is traceable to the 
identity of their views and sympathies with 
the Albigenses. The same people, deriving 
their origin from the same Word and Spirit, 
meet in this instance, and, "like kindred 
drops, mingle into one." Luther startled 
Europe when he endorsed and vindicated the 
injured Huss. It was a testimony, however, 
demanded at the time, and both generous and 
just. His own wronged motives and character 
have stood all the brighter for it. The Wal- 
denses, the Albigenses, the Nestorians, the 
Paulicians, are now also being reached, and 
are beginning to be rescued from obloquy and 
oblivion with their later brethren. 

The churches of the valleys, with which the 
Paulicians became identified, were planted by 
Paul, as current tradition affirms, — a fact, in- 
deed, often admitted in substance by the In- 
quisitors themselves. Never connected with 



THE PAULICIANS. 113 

the church of Rome, and uniformly protesting 
alike, against its errors and those also of the 
Gnostics and Manichseans, fraternization with 
them is of itself a sufficient vindication of the 
Paulicians from the scandals of Rome. 

In and after the tenth century — the period 
in which they become so favourably known to 
us — the stream becomes too modern, broad, 
and majestic, to be effectually clouded and 
soiled by Papal hands. Pure and noble, say 
we, must have been the fountains that, in a 
remote antiquity and in desert places, began to 
send out such healing and refreshing waters. 
Providence is opening a brighter era for the 
memory of the injured martyrs. The voices 
of the present are mingled already with those 
of past ages in most gratifying harmony. Ex- 
treme intervals of time and space are becoming 
annihilated. The deep beds of seas and rivers 
are giving up their secrets, and fountains their 
chronicles. The vaults of unexplored grottos 
and the halls of buried cities are yet, it is also 
believed, to break the painful silence of cen- 
turies, and to make still more illustrious the 
unity of Zion's testimony and the purity and 
patience of the saints. But, in any event, it 
is quite certain, even now, that the Saracens, 

when they extended over the Paulicians their 
10* 



114 ISnMAEL AND TIIE CHURCH. 

effective protectorate, were but aiding the same 
church in Asia on which heaven has so sig- 
nally affixed its seal in Europe and America, 
and which it was commanded them that they 
should not hurt. 

Thus the witnesses did not break, but con- 
tinued, their succession. The disappearance 
of the Paulicians from Asia was not their ex- 
tirpation, but their exodus. The candlestick 
was not destroyed; it was removed from the 
Euphrates to the Rhone. The star that set 
in the mountains of Armenia rose to adorn 
the glaciers of the Alps. Out of the East, 
now finally become the field of blood and the 
charnel-house of nations, God had but called 
his Bride to hide her in her long-prepared 
citadel of rocks in the West. It was her next 
retreat, prior to her last, across the Atlantic. 
Ishmael's wild and bloody defence was now at 
length to be exchanged for the safer defiles of 
inaccessible mountains. 

The distinct recognition of the doctrine of 
the Trinity, and of Jesus as God's eternal Son, 
possessed of equal power and glory with the 
Father, on the part of the Nestorians and the 
Paulicians, exposed them equally with all others 
to the sword of the Saracens ; since all such are 
indiscriminately denounced in the Koran, and 



THE PAULICIANS. 115 

alike condemned to death, to tribute, or the 
flames. The preservation of these Christians, 
therefore, was an event not only not to have 
been anticipated, but, even now that we have all 
the facts before us, is to be accounted for with 
the greatest difficulty, and even to be rejected 
as a fable, were it not attested by the unbroken 
voice of antiquity. 

The Pagans and Jews, the Latins and 
Greeks, experienced the rigour of Moham- 
medan rule when under it, and, when not, 
the torment of perpetual aggressions. But 
these Christians, though holding the dogma 
most offensive to the pseudo-prophet, and to 
falsify and overthrow which he makes war 
upon the world, do not so much as lose their 
citizenship. Yea, even while their very contro- 
versies make it all the more obvious that they 
exalt Jesus to a divine Sonship, and worship 
him as the equal and the companion of the 
Father, they are carefully protected and their 
wrongs avenged on their adversaries by those 
who are by their principles and prejudices 
arrayed against them. " What shall we then 
say to these things," but that it was com- 
manded them so to do by Mohammed, because 
he could not curse, as Balaam could not, whom 
God had not cursed ? — that the command was 



116 ISHilAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

repeated by the caliphs in every subsequent 
age of their rule, because God had ordained 
that "the people should dwell alone, and 
should not be reckoned among the nations"? 
The utterances of prophecy are laws of provi- 
dence, that, amid all possible and conflicting 
contingencies, cannot be broken. The flood — 
the tendency of which is tho whole world's 
destruction — bears up and saves the ark. 



CHAPTER XV. 

MOHAMMED PROTECTING THE TRUE CHURCH: 
THE PHILADELPHIA'S. 

" He shall not .... shoot an arrow there." 

Among the seven churches of Asia, Phila- 
delphia alone received the distinct promise of 
being kept from the hour of temptation that 
should come upon all the world to try them 
that dwelt upon the earth. (Rev. x. 3.) Perse- 
cutions by pagan emperors could not have been 
intended, it is thought, since these had already 
commenced. John's banishment to Patmos be- 
longed to such forms of oppression; and he 
could not then in that conjuncture have re- 
spected them as new, peculiar, and as yet to 
come, or as yet to startle the church by a 
sudden invasion and to seduce and destroy her 
children. 

The gradual growth of error, as tares spring 
up imperceptibly and slowly among the wheat, 
seems not either to suit the action of the temp- 
tation which is to come upon the church from 

1.17 



118 ISHMAEL AND THE CHUKCH. 

causes external to herself, or to be sprung 
upon it suddenly, as a snare upon the unsus- 
pecting bird. The great apostasy of the Greeks 
and Latins did not come upon the church; it 
grew up in it. It was not a sudden expansion 
of a snare, but the gradual development of the 
smallest beginnings of evil. That apostasy 
continues still. It has not yet completed the 
whole circuit of its prophetic hour; and from it 
Philadelphia has not been preserved, as it must 
have been if that snare had been intended. 
She has fallen into the idolatry and supersti- 
tion of the Greek church quite as deeply as 
any of her sister churches. 

No universal temptation suddenly brought 
upon the whole world from a source wholly 
external to its existing institutions, that began 
to be, in a period subsequent to the banishment 
of John, answers to the language of the text 
like that of the rise and spread of the Mo- 
hammedan delusion. It arose from a source 
wholly external to all other religions. It came 
suddenly, like a snare, upon the whole world. 
In six years after the first invasion of Syria by 
the Saracens the whole of that vast and popu- 
lous country was in their power. Even Asia 
Minor was reached, and Laodicea succumbed to 
the false prophet. The subsequent subjugation 



THE PHILADELPHIA'S. 119 

of Egypt, Persia, Bokhara, and Africa, seemed 
but the brief work of a clay. As nothing can 
stop the progress of the locust but Heaven's own 
tempest driving them back into the sea, so 
nothing could stop the progress of the Saracens 
but a Divine interposition. They were, even 
at the point of defeat, quite irresistible. 

There was in the new faith also a snare, a 
speciousness, a show of piety and of religious 
zeal or sincerity, that made it and its pro- 
fessors compare very favourably with the reli- 
gion and the disciples of a degenerate Christen- 
dom. And, when social equality with the 
new lords of the civilized world, it was found, 
could be at once purchased by embracing Is- 
lamism, thousands chose this alternative and 
renounced Christianity. It is not, therefore, 
without strong reasons that this passage has 
been supposed to relate to this temptation. 

The spiritual or internal history of the 
church of Philadelphia, since a.d. 96, lies 
shrouded in deep obscurity. It was and still 
is connected with the Greek church. Its dis- 
tance from the sea, its neglect by the emperors, 
(noticed by Gibbon,) must have been favourable 
to its retention of primitive simplicity and 
purity. Both commerce and imperial influence 
would, in the fifth century, have proved ad- 



120 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

verse to its fidelity to Christ in a very high 
degree. In its seclusion it may have retained 
for a season its integrity. 

And equally adverse would have been the 
capture of the city by the Saracens. The testa- 
ment of Mohammed granted to the Nestorians 
would not have sheltered the Christians of 
Philadelphia, since they belonged to the com- 
munion of the Greek church, against which 
the Mohammedans regarded themselves as 
having had committed to them a mission of 
special severity. If, in the event of their sub- 
jugation, the same terms had been presented 
to the Philadelphians which had been before 
to other communities, the church must have 
lost its Christianity by acceding to them, or 
have been put to the sword if they refused. 
The protection of the city from the Saracenic 
invaders involves in it, therefore, the protec- 
tion of the church which it contained, from the 
temptation. The temptation spread its snare 
over the conquered, and over those only. To 
them were its awful alternatives invariably 
submitted. 

The promise likewise to keep the church of 
Philadelphia "from the hour of temptation" 
was based upon its previous fidelity to Christ, 
— a past and finished virtue. This it was 



TIIE PHILADELPIIIANS. 121 

that secured the reward. Whatever might 
have been the possible character of the church 
in after-years or during the period designated 
in the benediction, it could not have affected 
the specific result. "Because thou hast kept 
the word of my patience, therefore will I 
keep thee from the hour of temptation which 
shall come," — i. e. thy past fidelity shall secure 
the future blessing. The preservation of 
the city, therefore, from the Saracens during 
the continuance of the prophetic hour — viz. : 
during the whole period of the reign of the 
caliphs — would be, as a well-ascertained 
historic fact, a remarkable fulfilment of the 
promise, even though we might suspect, at 
the same time, that the church had perhaps 
made herself quite unworthy of the divine 
favour, or had lost her spiritual life long be- 
fore the first woe,* from which she was to 
have been kept, according to the promise, had 
passed away. 

Philadelphia was captured by the Turks in 
a.d. 1391, 630 years after the first woe had 
become merged and lost in the second.f Its 
name was changed to that of " Allah Shihr," — 
"city of God," or "high town." In 1824 it con- 

* The Empire of the Caliphs. f The Ottoman Empire. 
11 H 



122 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

tained three thousand houses. Two hundred 
and fifty of these belonged to Christians of the 
Greek sect, — i.e. to nominal Christians. These 
point out the church in which the believers 
were accustomed to assemble who were ad- 
dressed in the epistle of him that had "the 
key of David." It is now a mosque, in which 
God is denied to have a Holy Spirit or a Son. 
Another, once dedicated to St. John, is turned 
into a dunghill to receive the offals of dead 
beasts. Five other old ruins are occupied as 
places of worship. Twenty other spots, the 
sites of once flourishing churches, are covered 
with their abandoned walls, on whose crumb- 
ling stones are found the pictures of saints 
badly painted or partially defaced. The palace 
of the bishop (such it is sometimes called) is 
but a cottage of clay. The Turkish conquest 
has made Philadelphia a comparative solitude. 
Christianity has left nothing behind her here 
but the faintest traces of her departed feet, or 
the moonlit shadows of her receding form 
stealing through old ruins or idolatrous cere- 
monials and sleeping on the pale faces of the 
dead. Among the seven cities of Asia, Phila- 
delphia was the last to capitulate; and the 
articles agreed to, secured to her the free ex- 
ercise of her religion ; but still the Turks have 



TIIE PHILADELPHIA'S. 123 

sadly disregarded their covenants in this 
respect. 

" Among the Greek colonies and churches 
of Asia, Philadelphia is still erect, — a column 
in a scene of ruin, a pleasing example that 
the paths of honour and of safety may some- 
times be the same."* This is a beautiful 
picture ; and, from the frequency with which 
it is referred to, it seems to have been for- 
gotten that it is but a picture. Philadelphia 
is certainly not more prosperous than its sister 
cities, — is not "a column erect" in a scene 
of ruin. It does not stand out in striking 
contrast with every other creation of genius 
or of industry in Ionia or Lydia. It is itsell 
a ruin, lifting up its bare and desolate head 
to mourn over its own and over surrounding 
ruins? A few pillars, bearing their shafts aloft, 
may remind the traveller of the promise, — " I 
will make him a pillar;" but they can have no 
real or intelligible connection with the pro- 
phecy. The name "city of God" has ap- 
peared to some very suggestive, because it was 
written in the prophecy, "I will write upon 
him the name of the city of my God, which is 
New Jerusalem." But, unfortunately, " New 

* Gibbon vol. vi. p. 229. 



124 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

Jerusalem" is not the name of Philadelphia. 
A few Greeks living in Philadelphia, calling 
themselves Christians, — a circumstance com- 
mon in many other Turkish towns ; — a few mas- 
sive pillars not yet prostrate by earthquakes ; — 
the name "city of God;" — and the rhetoric of 
Gibbon respecting the seven churches of Asia, 
and quoted above, — constitute the staple of 
those materials from which are wrought out, I 
regret to say, a supposed fulfilment of this pro- 
phecy : — " I will keep thee from the hour of 
temptation." And yet Philadelphia is even 
more desolate and less Christian than some 
other of the seven noted cities named in the 
Patmos epistles. Smyrna, in particular, has a 
population of 130,000 :— 20,000 Greeks, 8000 
Armenians, 1000 Europeans, 9000 Jews, — a 
population in the aggregate of 38,000 who are 
not Moslems, of whom 29,000 are nominally 
Christian. Philadelphia, with but 250 Greek 
families, and with only 3000 houses in all, 
makes but a sorry appearance in the contrast. 
It would seem, therefore, most reasonable 
to conclude that the promise to Philadelphia 
has already long ago had its complete ful- 
filment, and that under the first woe. The 
command given not to hurt the grass of the 
earth, neither any green thing, neither any 



THE rHILADELPIIIANS. 125 

tree, but only those men that have not the 
seal of God in their foreheads,* may then in 
this view of the subject connect itself naturally 
enough with the promise to the church of 
Philadelphia that she should be kept from 
that hour of temptation ;f and both find their 
sufficient and satisfactory illustration in the 
finished revolution of the same prophetic 
period, or in the single empire of the caliphs. 
The Turks, in the second woe, overthrowing 
Greece, were placed under no such restrictions 
as were the Saracens. They were sent out to 
kill; and they have ever been distinguishable 
from the Saracens in this respect more than in 
any other. They have never discriminated 
between the sealed and those who were not. 
The first woe, therefore, must cover the epoch 
designated, and that only. It was a world-wide 
snare; had its origin, progress, and end, all 
within itself; and of it it is said, " The first 
woe is passed." It was restricted in its ravages. 
It was made to respect the interests of the 
sealed. 

While, therefore, the first and the second 
woes are connected, we should not forget 
that they are, nevertheless, distinct from each 

* Rev. ix. 4. f Rev. iii. 10. 

11* 



126 ISHMAEL AND THE CHUKCH. 

other both in prophecy and in history. The 
second originates in the first, revives while 
it tramples it, and gives to it an aggra- 
vated form; but this intimate union of the 
two woes does not confound them with each 
other. They are still to be kept distinct in 
our conceptions of them, as they are in the 
word of God. And in that event the whole 
obscurity will vanish, and the promise to the 
church of Philadelphia, that "she should be 
kept from the hour of temptation," and the 
command to the Saracens "not to hurt the 
sealed," coincide as prophecies relating to the 
same prophetic period, and find their mutual 
illustrations in the facts of history and during 
the reign of the caliphs: — a fulfilment this 
of the word of God most complete in itself, 
extending through a vast cycle of years and 
events, which are already fully consummated; 
a fulfilment that needs not to beg for illustra- 
tions at the lying ruins of an old Turkish town, 
or garble for sustentation at the rhetoric of an 
infidel.* 

When the conquests of the caliphs had 
swept up to the confines of Asia Minor and 
t.hey were commencing to destroy its churches, 

* Gibbon, vol. vi. p. 229, (Boston edition.) 



THE PHILADELPHIANS. 127 

a pestilence arrested their farther progress in 
that direction. The angel of death guarded 
the passes to the favoured city. Horses, cattle, 
25,000 soldiers, and their ablest officers, perished 
without hand. The tents of Syria were in 
affliction; the curtains of the land of Ishmael 
trembled. That year, called by them "the 
year of destruction,"* put back their sword 
into its sheath, and turned their camp into a 
hospital. 

Two hundred years after this, Asia Minor is 
again invaded, Ephesus taken, and its lofty 
cathedral turned into a stable for mules and 
horses ; and perhaps it was from the influence 
of the Paulicians over their Saracenic allies 
that the battle was made to turn at this time 
also from Philadelphia.*)- 

Their rising empire spread in every direction 
around the city, around the confines of Lydia 
and Ionia, and left everywhere the deep and 
bloody traces of its barbarism and the deadly 
venom of its faith. But, under the protecting 
care and love of Him who guarded her walls, 
Philadelphia still stood secure. Syria, Egypt, 
Africa, Spain, Persia, Bokhara, Samarcand, 

* Ockle}''s Saracens, p. 255, (Bonn's edition.) 
f Gibbon, vol. v. p. 393. 



128 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

became conquered provinces; the victorious 
Moslems had reached alike the confines of 
China and the waves of the Atlantic; the 
Tiber had been entered, the JEgea,n Sea had 
been crossed, Rome and Constantinople shaken; 
forty thousand churches, cities, and castles, 
had been subverted, had opened their gates, 
had lost their defences, had descended, altar, 
crucifix, and battlement, to the dust; but Phila- 
delphia still survived, — surveyed in security, 
from her heaven-sealed palaces, the wild up- 
roar of war, the ruin of surrounding churches 
and provinces, the tears and the wreck of na- 
tions : yea, saw in peace the close of the pro- 
jDhetic " hour" itself, — the end of the woe, as it 
sank and disappeared in the sepulchre of the 
last of the caliphs. 

How she stood, while every town and fenced 
wall and strong nationality in Asia and in 
Africa went down under the rush of the 
Moslem host, remains sealed up among the 
mysteries not yet unfolded. The barriers of 
stone and the "courage"* of her sons cannot 
be assigned as the causes of safety ; since the 



* Gibbon, vol. vi. p. 229. If, instead of by the Turks, 
it bad been captured by the Saracens, this sneer at the 
" prophecy" would have worn a graver aspect. 



THE PHILADELrniANS. 129 

Saracens never appeared before Philadelphia 
at all, "to cast a bank against it or shoot an 
arrow there." Oh, what a law of Providence 
is that word of promise ! " Because thou hast 
kept the word of my patience, I also will 
keep thee from the hour of temptation, which 
shall come upon all the world, to try them that 
dwell upon the earth." No law of material 
nature is more abiding. " He speaks, and it is 
done. He commands, and it stands." 



CHAPTER XVI. 

MOHAMMED PROTECTING THE TRUE CHURCH: 
THE ALBIGENSES. 

" Their fates were painted ere the men were born." 

Famine ever follows on the track of war. 
The Saracens looked from the Atlantic coast 
over conquered but exhausted countries. They 
were impoverished by the ruin that had 
blighted the creations of genius and the fields 
of the reaper along their own broad and de- 
solate path. Before them lay a vast ocean ; 
behind them a social wilderness, — cities broken 
down and without walls or enterprise, pro- 
vinces uncultivated or forsaken. Europe alone 
expanded her untouched treasure and inflamed 
their cupidity and their courage. The narrow 
Straits of Gibraltar presented no barrier to 
their resistless progress. An Andalusian king- 
dom was soon acquired and added to the do- 
minions of the caliph. 

An ocean, breaking at their feet, had turned 

130 



THE ALBIGENSIAN CIlURCn. 131 

back the Saracens ; but the Pyrenees and the 
Avarlike nations of the frigid North ' invited 
their squadrons to new enterprises of war. 
France is also invaded. Her fair provinces 
are oppressed by gathering armies and horses 
running to battle. The sanctuary of the sacra- 
mental host is now on a sudden thrown open 
to the spoiler, lies in the immediate vicinity 
of the doubtful strife. The Khone alone sepa- 
rates the Albigenses from the scimitar and the 
Koran. And here, as on the invaded borders 
of Asia Minor, the conquerors of the world are 
again arrested, and the dismayed remnant 
never return to gather the spoil or bury their 
dead. 

"After a bloody field, in which Abderame 
was slain, the Saracens in the close of the even- 
ing retired to their camp. In the disorder and 
despair of the night the various tribes of Yemen 
and Damascus, of Africa and Spain, were pro- 
voked to turn their arms against each other; the 
remains of their host were suddenly dissolved, 
and each emir consulted his safety by a hasty 
and separate retreat. At the dawn of day the 
stillness of a hostile camp was suspected by 
the victorious Christians. On the report of 
their spies they ventured to explore the riches 
of the vacant tents The Arabs never 



132 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

resumed the conquest of Gaul ; and they were 
soon driven beyond the Pyrenees."* 

Ah me ! but for this, what might have been 
the result on the ensuing day ! On the issues of 
its bloody debate hung the fates of Europe, the 
church, and the world. Ten thousand centres 
of purity and progress were at that moment in 
reach of the scimitar, — might have been oblite- 
rated forever. The last hunted remnant of a 
pure Christianity lay exposed and helpless in 
contiguous valleys. The terrible crisis had 
come ; and now either Heaven must interpose 
and destroy the destroyer, or leave the night 
of an Asiatic barbarism to spread itself for 
unknown ages over the fair provinces of West- 
ern civilization. " It was commanded them 
that they should not hurt the grass of the 
earth, neither any green thing, neither any 
tree, but only those men that had not the seal 
of God in their foreheads." This was the im- 
passable barrier that met them at Philadelphia 
and on the Rhone, and contains both the philo- 
sophy and the secret of the successes and the 
failures of the Saracens. 

The new wine was in the cluster that adorned 
the vine of the Alps; and Heaven had said, 

* Gibbon, ch. 52, p. 290 



THE ALBIGEXSIAN CHURCH. 133 

"Destroy it not, for a blessing is in it." Paul, 
in his journey to Spain, had planted in these 
secluded regions a church that had never 
adhered to Rome. Great accessions had been 
made to its numbers when the remonstrants 
and the persecuted, from time to time, retired 
from the open idolatry of Christendom into 
the shelter of the wilderness. And to that 
fact, and not to her want of guilt, Europe 
owed her preservation. Sodom could not fall 
while Lot was there, nor could Jerusalem, 
until the righteous had made good their escape 
to the mountains. And, as God had chosen 
the heart of Europe, the gorges of the Alps, 
in which to gather and cherish his spiritual 
family, that event became the living source 
of security to the West, — kept the Asiatic 
scourge, like lightning on the skirts of a cloud, 
to expend itself on the borders of a guilty 
land, which Heaven would not destroy because 
a blessing was in it. 
12 



CHAPTER XVII. 

FOUNDING OF BAGDAD THE END OF THE 
PROPHETIC MONTHS. 

" Their power was to hurt men five months." — Rev. ix. 10. 

Mohammed, according to Dean Pride aux, 
was born at Mecca, in the month of May, a.d. 
571. Others leave the point undecided be- 
tween a.d. 569 and 571. When he was forty 
years of age, he took upon him the style of 
" The Apostle of God," and began to propagate 
his imposture. In one hundred and fifty 
years from this time his followers ceased from 
aggressive wars and founded the "City of 
Peace," or, which is the same thing, the city 
of Bagdad. 

From that period (a.d. 762) the caliphs 
abandoned the coarse habits and cultivated 
hardiness of warriors, and gave themselves up 
to luxuries that rivalled in their expensive 
magnificence the palmiest displays of the 
Babylonian or Persian princes. Here, amid 

104 



THE rROPIIETIC MONTHS. 135 

gorgeous palaces and in the embraces of the 
harem, expired forever the martial glory of 
the Saracens. 

The interval between a.d. 612 and a.d. 762 
is just equal to John's five prophetic months, 
or one hundred and fifty days, of years. If, 
however, we assume the correctness of either 
of the above dates assigned as the time of the 
birth of Mohammed, the discrepancy would be 
too inconsiderable to awaken any suspicion 
of a want of truth in the prophecy, since mis- 
takes of a few years in such calculations are 
but too common. If intelligent individuals 
among us even now are found who are quite 
uncertain as to the time of their own births, 
notwithstanding the living witnesses and the 
recency of the chronological era to be fixed, 
we ought not to be surprised that a possible 
mistake of a few years obscured the question 
relating to the time of Mohammed's birth, — 
a fact lying back more than twelve centuries 
from our own times, in an obscure spot, in 
a barbarous age, and among a people who 
reckoned time by lunar months and with con- 
fessed inaccuracy. 

And, as John was guided by inspiration, I 
assume his correctness, and from this source 
confirm the infallible correctness of the com- 



136 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

mon reckoning. In assuming the absolute cor- 
rectness of any other date, we are left at all 
uncertainties in the mists of an era that lies 
back of the Hegira itself, and in the very chaos 
of Arabian chronology. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE CONTRAST BETWEEN CHRIST AND MOHAMMED. 

To make them from restraint and conscience free, 
Bad as thyself, or worse, — if worse can be." 

The wars of the Saracens were prolonged 
through a period of one hundred and fifty 
years, with but partial intermissions. Their 
path of carnage likewise was made through 
the most densely-peopled portions of the globe. 
It left desolate its richest cities and provinces. 
"They destroyed wonderfully. And they had 
a king over them, which was the angel of the 
bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew 
tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue 
hath his name Apollyon."* 

The waste of human life must have been im- 
mense. To say nothing of the incalculable losses 
in beautiful villas, castles, cities, palaces, — to 
agriculture, commerce, and literature, — the loss 
of life in battles and sieges, and the loss of im- 



* Kev. ix. 11. 
12* i 137 



138 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

mortal men, perishing without repentance, or 
living to die in apostasy from Christ, justifies 
the designation "Destroyer" — points out the 
true character of the woe, and of the manner 
in which the Mohammedans rose to power. 

All along the line of their march, in town 
and country, they have left everywhere their 
broad trail of enduring desolation. Cities sit 
solitary; thronged streets are become a portion 
for foxes ; the raven's noisy croak rises from for- 
saken balconies and from the area of palaces and 
theatres. The brave defenders of their invaded 
country sleep where they fell, amid ruins which 
have never been restored. Progressive civiliza- 
tion, which obliterates elsewhere the ravages of 
war or of time, disturbs not their resting-places. 
The mould of ages covers their bones. 

The angel that presided at the incantations 
of Hara was the " destroyer." He aided the 
inventiveness of his dupe, deceived the de- 
ceiver, instructed his revenge, poured venom 
on his bitter communings respecting his per- 
secutors at Mecca, whispered in his attentive 
ear of the sweetness of bloody reprisals, made 
him respect his own skill and courage, and 
filled him with the lust of success. Animated 
with pandemonial zeal, he grasped the burning 
brand, and felt it to be instinctive with the 



CONTRAST CHRIST AND MOHAMMED. 139 

successes of his diabolical mission. He began, 
and continued till lie died, the work of "de- 
struction." 

The same angel also that inspired the fury 
of the prophet inspired the courage of his 
lieutenants, and led them on against the 
church in their mission of woe. The same 
untiring malignity that led Cain to murder 
his brother, that led Balaam to desire to 
curse whom God had not cursed, that led 
Herod to slay the babes of Bethlehem, that 
conducted the trial before, Pilate, and that 
directed the tragedy of the cross, led on the re- 
morseless bands of Arabia upon Christendom. 

The result sought was the utter undoing of 
the entire church, both the true and the false ; 
and that result was held in arrest only because 
the reins of an ultimate restraint had been 
placed in the hand of bleeding mercy. The 
same mighty Man-child that ever confounded 
the dark policies of the pit was he who pro- 
tected the Nestorians, the Paulicians, the re- 
fugees of the monasteries, his loved ones in 
Philadelphia, and who broke up and scattered 
the army of the aliens on the banks of the 
Khone. 

The failure of the destroyer was the failure 
of a bridled rage, of a hungry tiger that had 



140 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

reached the end of his chain and that still 
roared after his prey. The same blessed 
Messiah who said in the days of his flesh, 
"Come out of him, thou unclean spirit," had 
also said, "Hurt not the grass of the field, 
neither any green thing, neither any tree, but 
only those men who have not the seal of God 
in their foreheads." This, and this only, was 
it that bounded and controlled the rage of the 
destroyer. But for this, there would have 
been no limit to the progress of the woe. 

The hand that opened the cave of Hara 
was the hand of him "that had the power of 
death," unbarring the gates of perdition. The 
spirit that presided over the dusky warriors 
that rushed up from the recesses of the desert 
was that of " Abaddon ." The field of his con- 
quests was that world which the cross had 
turned into the theatre of redemption. That 
lost world he would retain as his own, and 
spread, over the bosom of a blighted orb and a 
perished humanity, the crimes and the woes 
of hell. 

Contrasts there are between Christ and Mo- 
hammed; but they are all too intense. They 
are rather the contests between the seed of the 
woman and the seed of the serpent. The 
object aimed at on the part of the adversary 



CONTRAST — CIIEIST AXD MOTIAMMED. 141 

is the ruin of Christ and of his kingdom in 
this world. The master-spirit in the contest 
is that of the angel of the bottomless pit. 
When first created, he kept not his first estate 
or principality, but left his own habitation, 
then assigned him, to invade that of others. 
Ours was invaded, and paradise and immortal- 
ity lost. And at this point it is that God 
interposes and puts enmity between the seed 
of the woman and the seed of the serpent. 

Not that, previously to this period, harmony 
had existed between Christ and Belial; but 
now, while the world should stand, they should 
be placed in the relations of an intimate and a 
necessary antagonism. Satan, by the fall, 
rose, in accordance with the decrees of eternal 
justice, to be the tormentor of his dupes, — had 
given to him "the power of death."* But, 
while the evil, once originated, must take its 
course according to determinate and immutable 
laws, God, without changing these, originated 
a new and an independent centre of life in a 
Redeemer, who should in the fulness of the 
times destroy him that had the power of 
death. 

Placed thus in the same world, there opens, 

*Heb.ii. 



142 ismrAEL and the church. 

from the fall to the last shock of time, the con- 
flict of ages. And this it is that we are to 
see in the field of blood over which waves the 
red right hand of Ishmael. It is Michael and 
his angels, and the dragon and his angels. 

But even between such antagonisms there 
are contrasts. They may be drawn, just as 
they are between righteousness and unright- 
eousness, light and darkness, good and evil. 
Commencing at Mecca and at Bethlehem, they 
meet and astonish us in every step of our 
way. 

The words of war and slaughter come up 
from the cave of Hara ; " Peace on earth, good- 
will toward men" are the utterances that reach 
the ears of prostrate and adoring shepherds 
in Judea. Mohammed came to destroy men's 
lives; Jesus came not to destroy men's lives, 
but to save them. Mohammed stands with 
garments rolled in blood, waving his drip- 
ping scimitar over the scattered ranks of 
death; Jesus went about doing good. His 
progress was ever along the wards of a 
vast hospital. Sights of woe ever met his 
weeping eye, and words of comfort ever fell 
from his blessed lips. While he moved 
through Judea, there was "balm in Gilead; 
there was a Physician there." When the eye 



CONTRAST CHRIST AND MOHAMMED. 143 

saw him, it blessed him; when the ear heard, 
it bore witness to him, because he delivered 
the poor that cried, the fatherless, and him 
that had none to help. 

Mohammed was guilty of a wholesale and 
remorseless assassination of the Jews. " Seven 
hundred were dragged in chains to the market- 
places of the city. They descended alive into 
the grave, prepared for their execution and 
burial; and the apostle beheld with an inflex- 
ible eye the slaughter of his helpless ene- 
mies."* But when Peter drew his sword, 
Jesus healed the wounded Malchus and re- 
buked his hasty disciple. Nor was this the 
policy of weakness or the resort of fear; for 
twelve legions of angels hung in invisible 
squadrons around him to bathe the holy moun- 
tains in blood for him. He was the Prince of 
peace. 

Mohammed taught the duty of forgiveness 
and harmony among his followers, but never- 
theless devoted all the rest of mankind to 
tribute or the sword. Jesus said, " Love your 
enemies; bless them that curse you; do good 
to them that hate you, and pray for them 
that scornfully use and persecute you." And 

* Gibbon, vol. v. p. 134. 



144 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

when, abandoned by all, lie bung upon the 
cross, and heard the insults and the scoffs of 
those who cast vile imputations in his teeth, 
he said, "Father, forgive them; for they know 
not what they do." The very wretch that 
pierced his side but opened the fountains of 
his own salvation ; and in that very city which 
wronged and slew him, — whose blood-steeped 
pavements cried loudest to the frowning hea- 
vens for retribution, — in that very city was 
the apostolic commission first opened, were the 
propositions of pardon first made. The army 
likewise which rose and spread his empire had 
their feet shod with the preparation of the 
gospel of peace. The sword they wielded was 
the sword of the Spirit; and friends and foes 
were alike pointed to the bleeding cross as 
prisoners of hope. 

It is quite too revolting — quite beyond the 
pale of even a tolerable delicacy — to take up 
the question of comparative moral purity. 

When we pass from the divine presence of 
him who was holy, harmless, undefiled, and 
separate from sinners, and begin with that 
satyr of the desert, that unclean beast in 
married life, who justified himself in pro- 
miscuous intercourse by pleading a dispensa- 
tion, — when we attempt to touch, even in this 



CONTRAST — CHRIST AND MOHAMMED. 145 

respect, that indelible blot on the cheek of 
humanity, — the touch itself is pollution. It is 
a shame even to speak of those things, in any 
minuteness of detail, which were done by the 
prophet of Mecca. 

And, as to truth, it was foreign to the daily 
utterances of the hardened impostor. To talk 
of his probable sincerity may suit the senti- 
mentalist, or the infidel in want of a reason; 
but it is difficult for the candid to be in such 
a milky humour respecting one whose very 
successes depended on successful falsehood, 
hypocrisy, and the sword. 

The signs and wonders attesting the verity 
of our Lord's blessed mission are sought for in 
vain in the history of the Arabian prophet. 
The bed of lust and the blood of murder alone 
speak for him, and point him out as the enemy 
of Christ and of man. Contrasts there are in- 
deed; but they are contrasts of things that 
differ in nature, and are in necessary and end- 
less opposition. 

The power and permanency of evil may be 
traced by the historian and the philosopher to 
the deep impressions made by one mind of 
singular strength on kindred tribes and on 
successive generations ; but the instructed dis- 
ciple in accounting for the phenomena must 

13 



146 ISHMAEL AXD TnE CHURCH. 

look behind the veil to a more potent indi- 
viduality, ever active in its untiring malignity, 
which reproduces in a successor the wasted 
energies of the fallen prophet and perpetuates 
the woe. And it was for this purpose — that we 
might not lose, in the detail of visible agencies, 
the vision of the one ever-active master-spirit 
that stamps its own dark features on Islamism 
from generation to generation — that it is said, 
in concluding the delineation, "And they had 
a king over them, which was the angel of the 
bottomless pit." 

One of the twelve disciples rises from the 
table of the Lord, goes out and betrays his 
Master. We look at causes as they appear to 
us. He is exposed by our Lord's reference to 
his dipping in the dish. The eyes of all turn 
on him, and he is offended. He had thought 
of the profits of treason before, but now he is 
enraged and resolved; and why? The ulti- 
mate determination of his will is traceable 
to an invisible agency: "Satan entered into 
him.' , 

Ananias sold his lands and kept back part 
of the price. His vanity was clamorous for 
the reputation of liberality, and his covetous- 
ness for the possession of his golden treasures. 
To cater to the gratification of both the one 



CONTRAST — CHRIST AND MOHAMMED. 147 

and the other required the utterance of a lie to 
the Holy Ghost. Such are the outward phe- 
nomena : but the true cause was invisible; and, 
in an account that should comprehend all the 
facts in the history of the crime of Ananias, 
that invisible cause must be made prominent : 
— " Why hath Satan rilled thy heart to lie unto 
the Holy Ghost?" 

In like manner also, in the history of all 
evil in those who deliberately enter upon a 
course of opposition to Christ and to his king- 
dom, there is the same account to be given 
of the secret cause which determined the will 
and instigated the iniquity. Satan enters into 
the erring soul, fills the false heart. And, 
indeed, all evil men, respected as individuals 
or as communities, when at war with Christ 
and his church, " have a king over them, which 
is the angel of the bottomless pit." 



CHAPTER XIX. 

THE SARACENIC MERGED IN THE OTTOMAN 
EMPIRE. 

" In the small compass of a grave, 
In endless night they sleep, unwept, unknown: 
No bard had they to make all time their own." 

Byron. 
"One woe is past." — Rev. ix. 12. 

The sudden and vast expansion of the em- 
pire of the caliphs was the wind in its sails that 
dashed it on the rocks. It resulted in destruc- 
tive domestic wars and in the erection of sepa- 
rate and powerful states. 

Spain, Mauritania, Africa, and Egypt, were 
severed by distance, interest, and the sword, 
from their Oriental masters. Arabia also, too 
remote and sparsely peopled to form an influ- 
ential and a continued centre for a great mon- 
archy, the resort of fierce and impracticable 
fanatics, the theatre of strifes, of assassina- 
tions, and stained often with patrician blood, 
was finally abandoned from necessity rather 
than policy. 

148 



THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE. 149 

A new and splendid city, founded by Alman- 
zor, rose as by enchantment on the eastern 
bank of the Tigris, and near its confluence 
with the Euphrates. To it was transferred the 
throne and palace, the staff of the Apostle of 
God, and the other ensigns of civil and of 
sacred authority. And, though the rival mon- 
archies of the West held for ages a position of 
grandeur almost equal to that of the Abassides, 
yet, when the shepherd-kings rose to supre- 
macy in Bagdad, they brought back again to 
the ancient site of the long-fallen Babylon the 
balance of power and the revived " beauty of 
the Chaldees' excellency." 

Hence, in designating the change, and the 
continuation at the same time of the same 
power, the Euphrates, and the innumerable 
armies of horsemen that on a sudden rushed 
from its confines, are made the striking em- 
blems of the second woe. 

The smoke, issuing from a pit, suited the 
locality of Mecca, sunk as it was in a gulf 
formed by sharp and naked mountains, under 
torrid suns, and surrounded by burning sands. 
And when the martial zeal of the Saracenic 
empire revived again in its original prestige 
on the banks of the Euphrates, and, issuing 
from thence, reproduced the first woe through- 

13* 



150 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

out the southern hemisphere in more than its 
original bitterness, finishing a ruin that had 
been but begun, and completely subverting the 
throne of the Csesars, it becomes quite natural, 
in a continued symbolic delineation, to speak 
of it as the second woe, and as issuing from the 
celebrated river on the banks of which it un- 
expectedly culminates and becomes again the 
scourge and terror of the world. 

The Nestorian patriarch residing at Meru, 
on the southwestern slopes of those vast 
steppes that ascend toward the confines of 
China, had observed the progress of a race of 
Scythian shepherds toward the wide savan- 
nahs of Transoxiana and Carisme. This fact 
he at length communicated to the patri- 
arch at Bagdad, intimating that they were 
hastening to change the face of Asia and the 
fortunes of the world. Repairing to the coun- 
cil-chamber of the caliphs, the letter was read 
to the astonished chiefs. 

It stated that " a people numerous as the 
locust-cloud had burst from the mountains 
between Thibet and Katan, and were pouring 
down upon the fertile plains of Kashgar. 
They were commanded by seven kings, each 
at the head of seventy thousand horsemen. 
The warriors were as swarthy as Indians. 



THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE. 151 

They used no water in their ablutions, nor 
did they cut their hair. They were most 
skilful archers, and were content with simple 
and frugal fare. Their horses were fed upon 
meat."* 

Such were the first intimations of approach- 
ing change. It, however, fell upon the ears 
of a degenerate race, who, though descended 
from the mighty conquerors of Syria, had en- 
tombed the hardness and daring of the earlier 
caliphs in the magnificent harems of Bagdad. 

Extremes meet in their history. " Moham- 
med used at first, when preaching in his 
mosque at Medina, to lean upon a post of a 
palm-tree driven into the ground; but, being 
now invested with greater dignity, he had a 
pulpit built which had two steps up to it and 
a seat within. When Othman was caliph he 
hung it with tapestry, and Moawiyah raised it 
six steps higher."*}- 

Omar the caliph, in his journey to Jerusa- 
lem, " rode upon a red camel with a couple of 
sacks, in one of which he carried that sort of 
provision which the Arabs call 'sawik,' which 
is either barley, rice, or wheat, sodden and 

* " Nineveh and its Remains/' chap. viii. 
f Ockley, p. 46. 



152 ISIDIAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

unhusked ; the other was full of fruits. Be- 
fore him he carried a very great leathern 
bottle, (very necessary in those desert coun- 
tries to put water in;) behind him a large 
wooden platter. When encamped, he sat on 
the ground to eat. Then, filling his platter 
with the sawik, he very liberally entertained 
his fellow-travellers, who, without distinction, 
ate with him, all out of the same dish."* 

" Having met with some of the Saracens, 
richly dressed in silks that they had taken by 
way of plunder after the battle of Yarmuk, 
he spoiled all their pride ; for he caused them 
to be dragged along in the dirt with their 
faces downward, and their clothes to be rent 
in pieces. "f 

But when success had crowned their arms, 
and for three centuries they had had the lord- 
ship of the southern hemisphere, — an empire in 
which the sun rose and set, — the contrast with 
the simplicity of earlier times became intense. 

"When the Greek ambassador visited the 
court of Bagdad, the caliph's whole army," 
says the historian Abulfeda, " both horse and 
foot, was under arms, which together made a 
body of one hundred and sixty thousand men. 

* Ockley, p. 208. f Ibid. p. 211. 



TIIE OTTOMAN EMPIRE. 153 

His state-officers — the favourite slaves — stood 
near him in splendid apparel, their belts glit- 
tering with gold and gems. Near them were 
seven thousand eunuchs, four thousand of them 
white, the remainder black. The porters (or 
door-keepers) were in number seven hundred. 
Barges and boats, with the most superb decora- 
tions, were seen swimming upon the Tigris. 

" Nor was the palace itself less splendid, in 
which were hung up thirty-eight thousand 
pieces of tapestry, twelve thousand five hun- 
dred of which were of silk, embroidered with 
gold. The carpets on the floor were twenty-two 
thousand. One hundred lions were brought 
out, with a keeper to each lion. 

'■Among the other spectacles of rare and 
splendid luxury was a tree of gold and silver, 
spreading into eighteen large branches, on 
which, and on the lesser boughs, sat a variety 
of birds made of the same precious metals, 
as well as the limbs of the tree. While the 
machinery effected spontaneous motions, the 
several birds warbled their natural harmony. 
Through this scene of magnificence the Greek 
ambassador was led by the vizier to the foot 
of the caliph's throne."* 

* Gibbon, vol. v. p. 298. 
K 



154 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

Such splendour, however, was but the final 
blaze of an expiring greatness, to go out all 
the sooner for its unnatural brightness. The 
very menials that composed the trains of 
servants, and the very soldiers that filled the 
ranks of the army, defended the city, and 
upheld a decrepit dynasty, were foreigners, 
who learned to despise their effeminate em- 
ployers and the confessed imbecility which re- 
quired their aid. The transition from idolatry 
to Mohammedanism is easy. They embraced 
the short creed of the prophet with sincerity, 
and thus, though of a different origin, amalga- 
mated their nationality with that of their 
recent masters. 

Having, after a signal victory, founded the 
dynasty of the shepherd-kings in Persia, 
Toorul Bea\ their rude and successful chief, 
aspired to the throne and sceptre to the de- 
fence of which he had been called amid the 
domestic and bloody factions of Bagdad. 

Marrying the daughter of the caliph whom 
his sword supported, he died a.d. 1063, leav- 
ing no issue. Alp Arslan, his nephew, suc- 
ceeded to his title as sultan; and from this 
period "his name, after that of the caliph, was 
pronounced in the public prayers of the Mos- 



THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE. 155 

lems."* The union and the revolution was 
now complete, and the Turkish sultany had 
succeeded in every respect to the caliphate. 

The prophetic interval of three hundred 
and ninety-one years lies between this period 
and a.d. 1453, during which the four angels 
remained bound in \he great river, and pre- 
pared, whenever they should be summoned, to 
rush forth and slay "the third part of men."f 

The first third fell before the Goths and 
Vandals; the second before the caliphs; the 
third was now destined to fall before the Otto- 
mans. Such is the origin of the Turkish 
empire; and thus are connected the first and 
the second woes. 

The sword of the dying Mohammed was 
effectually wielded by his lieutenants. It 
became the symbol of his faith and the instru- 
ment of its success. When his followers threw 
it aside for the trowel, the plough, the lancet, 
studied the instructions of wisdom and sought 
the embraces of pleasure, the empire, like its 
founder, lost its vitality and sunk into the tomb. 

Just at this point it is, also, that its resusci- 
tation commences. The Scythian shepherds 
rise to the dominion, and, while they trample 

* Gibbon ; vol. v. p. 511. f Rev. ix. 15. 



156 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

its ashes, warm into unexpected life the cur- 
rent of its blood. The two races mingle into 
one, in the principles of their faith, in their 
intermarriages with each other; and the long- 
spent fury of Ishmael revives again in the 
children of the East. 

The empire of the shepherds remained a 
unit, swayed by a single mind, until the death 
of Malek Shah, when the succession was dis- 
puted in bloody debates by his brother and 
his four sons. These ended in the erection of 
the four sultanies, — viz. : Persia, Koum, Syria, 
and Kerrnan. These are the noted ministers 
of divine and long-restrained vengeance, — the 
four angels of the great river on whose banks 
they rise to power and from whence they 
spread their conquests. 

The prophet speaks of them as the four 
angels of the river, since it was during their 
fourfold division that the binding processes, in 
the wars of the cross, commenced. 

It seems also quite appropriate to retain this 
designation even after these divisions termi- 
nated, or to give the title to the main division 
or branch of the four, when it finally absorbs 
the strength of the other branches and becomes 
the prominent instrument in executing the 
decrees of Providence. As they had been 



THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE. 157 

bound when existing as the four sultanies, so 
the loosing of them would suggest that the 
restraint was taken off from them all alike 
and at the same time; which was the fact 
when their common foes, the Crusaders, had 
finally left the battle-fields of Asia. 

The preparation also "to slay the third part 
of men" belonged alike to all the sultanies; 
since during the period of the preparation to 
the time in which they were loosed to slay, 
they were a mutual aid to each other, and 
during the oppressions of the Crusades their 
combined power was needed for mutual pre- 
servation from extinction. 

It does not hence seem of much force to 
urge inasmuch as the Turkish branch of 
the great monarchy of the Euphrates mainly 
effected the overthrow of Greece, that there- 
fore the other branches could not have been 
included in the processes of the long-continued 
preparation. 

It is quite obvious, on the contrary, that the 
four sultanies mutually sustained each other 
amid the wars that threatened their total ruin 
as separate or as confederate states; and hence 
the processes of the preparation, the binding 
and the loosing, belong alike to the four, and it 
is proper and natural so to speak of them. 

14 



CHAPTER XX. 

THE CRUSADES THEIR CAUSES AND ENDS. 

"Hail, Calvary, thou mountain hoar, 
Wet with our Redeemer's gore ! 
Ye trampled tombs, ye fanes forlorn, 
Ye stones by tears of pilgrims worn ! 
Your ravish'd honours to restore, 
Fearless we climb this hostile shore!" 

Warton. 

The Turks, in the zeal of recent converts 
and in the cruelty of slaves just risen to be 
masters, exceeded the Saracens in intolerance 
and oppression, demanded of the pilgrims in 
the holy city impossible sums, dragged their 
patriarch by the hair of his head on the pave- 
ment, and turned the plains of Asia into 
a highway for their robber-bands. Princes, 
nobles, the ministers of religion and trains of 
unarmed peasants, on their way to the holy 
sepulchre, were alike pillaged, beaten, slain, 
and sometimes their stomachs ripped open and 
examined for treasures supposed to have been 
swallowed. 

There was in the Turkish accession to Mo- 

158 



THE CRUSADES. 159 

hammedanism a revival of the zeal and cru- 
elty of the tiger Caled, and of those that fol- 
lowed him in " the paths of blood." The time 
however for their peculiar mission had not 
yet arrived. They were anticipating it by 
centuries. They must therefore back again to 
their enclosures, lose Palestine and Peninsular 
Asia, and struggle in vain to burst their bonds 
or break from the frail barriers of the Eu- 
phrates, until the time appointed. 

In God's providential government of the 
world, his care for his church is ever a con- 
trolling consideration. 

When her safety is endangered, the caverns 
and gorges of the Alps become the hollow of his 
hand in which he hides her. His seal is placed 
upon the forehead of his people, and his pro- 
tective shield hangs at the gate of the monas- 
tery as soon as they enter there. An invisible 
rampart surrounds Philadelphia, because she 
shelters those who kept the word of his pa- 
tience. His people are in the valleys, and a 
vast army falls without hand, and flies in 
hopeless disarray from the banks of the Rhone. 

And to that same tender care of his church, 
so obvious in the past and so cheering in our 
anticipations of the future, are we to look for 
the causes of the Crusades. 



160 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

The voice of Peter the Hermit, summoning 
the fierce chivalry of the North to the rescue 
of the holy sepulchre, was the voice of God, 
commanding those who would have been sure 
to have arrested his gracious work in blood to 
a distant land, to gratify there their love of 
war, to expend there their martial rage on the 
turbulent sultanies, and finally to disappear 
there themselves, and bury their hosts forever 
in the oblivion of the desert. 

There is a choice in approaching or liable 
evils, and in the selection from among which 
of one rather than another a providential in- 
telligence discovers its wisdom. 

An apostate is also often a persecuting church, 
the implacable foe of Zion. But, evil and de- 
structive though it be, yet there are occasional 
mitigations, periods of intervening repose, and 
here and there a ray of a pure and sanctifying 
light. But a false system of faith, such as that 
of the Arabian prophet, is a ruin that leaves 
behind it no trace of that Christianity which 
it wholly exterminates. 

Catholic Europe, as compared with Britain 
and the United States, is one among the dark 
places of the earth ; still, an intenser darkness 
broods over Mohammedan countries. 

To bind these angels, therefore, within the 



THE CRUSADES. 1G1 

limits of their original dominions, was the 
will and the work of a proteetive Providence. 
God waits not till the myriads of the Turkish 
horse slake their thirst in the rivers and foun- 
tains of the Alps, ere he rouses to the defence 
of his bride in the wilderness. He anticipates 
and turns away the threatened ruin by turn- 
ing the tide of battle to the East. 

This event, then, is invested with a peculiar 
interest not only in itself, as it is a history of 
remarkable occurrences, but also with a rela- 
tive interest, as it is the next step in the series 
of those processes by which the church is pre- 
served from extermination, • and by means of 
which she is enabled to spread through Europe 
the imperishable elements of the great Refor- 
mation. 

In a.d. 1095 Peter the Hermit visited Je- 
rusalem, and saw and felt the brutal violence 
of the Turks with emotions of unutterable 
horror. The patriarch also recounted the 
trials of cruel mockings and scourgings, of 
bonds and exactions, to which his suffering 
flock had been subjected under the new regime. 
He witnessed also, with his own eyes, the tomb 
of Jesus defaced, the church of the resurrection 
violated, and the pilgrims perishing in want 
and misery around him. 

14* 



162 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

Convinced that expostulation would but 
tempt to heavier oppressions, and that, if Eu- 
rope would preserve the poor remains of an 
expiring Christianity from being entombed, 
amid the holiest memorials of her triumphs, 
in the very church of the resurrection, in the 
very sepulchre of Messias, she must do it 
with the sword, he resolved to arm her against 
Asia. 

He was an enthusiast, whose religious emo- 
tions, uninformed by revelation, took their 
complexion from the superstitions of the times. 
To him a hermitage was as congenial as Hara 
to Mohammed. Here his excited fancy created 
visions of saints and angels, of Jesus, Mary, 
and the martyrs ; and here the arch-deceiver 
inflamed his resentment and his zeal, until he 
turned his willing dupe into the enraptured 
seer, commissioned to call the West, not to 
the humanity of the Prince of peace, but to 
the carnival of blood in Palestine. 

When he came to Rome, Urban the Second, 
influenced either by policy or fanaticism, en- 
dorsed his inspiration and cherished his burn- 
ing ardour by his pontifical benediction. 

The flesh in this extraordinary man had 
become subject to the spirit. His strong and 
wiry frame, though attenuated by fasting and 



THE CRUSADES. 163 

frenzy, seemed but to increase in its power of 
endurance by the energy of a soul that ab- 
sorbed and supplied its vitality with a higher 
principle of life. Covered with a coarse gar- 
ment, with head and feet bare, and swaying a 
ponderous crucifix, he rode through Italy and 
France, the universal centre of an amazing in- 
terest, summoning the church to the enterprise 
of a holy war. 

There are times in which such an apparition 
would but awaken the merriment of the gay 
or the pity of the benevolent. But the ex- 
ample and the success of Mohammed had made 
its impression on a church which had lost her 
Bible in the manuscripts of a dead language 
and had gone back in the name of the cross to 
be governed by a disguised paganism, to re- 
gard the shield and battle-axe as more reliable 
than the sword of the Spirit in the defence and 
propagation of the gospel. The bread of the 
sacrament had also become a divinity to be 
worshipped. And, by an easy transition, the 
sepulchre of Jesus was invested with an awful 
sanctity. 

A kiss imprinted on the black stone of the 
Kaaba had never been so impassioned as the 
kiss of the pilgrim on the cold and stony floor 
of a Saviour's tomb. It was a means of salva- 



164 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

tion, a sign of love and devotion, more merito- 
rious than penitent emotions or the righteous- 
ness of faith. 

And when the dark eye of the hermit 
flashed at the recital of the wrongs and the 
sacrileges he himself had witnessed, rage crim- 
soned every cheek, and the long-cherished de- 
sire for retaliations on Asia turned into decrees 
in the bosoms of princes. 

A council of "two hundred bishojDS, four 
hundred of the clergy, and thirty thousand of 
the laity," assembled at Placentia. The am- 
bassadors also of the emperor reached the spot 
from Constantinople. 

These united in urging the Latins instantly 
to arm, not to wait for the inevitable invasion 
of Europe, but to anticipate and forestall that 
event by becoming themselves the invaders. 

The vast concourse heard the recital of 
dangers imminent, and wrongs already inflicted 
on a bleeding church and long endured with- 
out either mitigation or redress, with tears of 
sympathy, and sent back to Alexius their 
solemn pledges of material aid. 

From this great council went out also the 
coadjutors of the hermit, seconding his efforts, 
spreading themselves throughout the provinces, 
addressing excited and superstitious crowds, 



THE CRUSADES. 1G5 

and invoking the war-spirit in the remotest 
villages. 

France in the same autumn became also the 
theatre of another vast conclave, whose de- 
liberations ended in the active mustering of 
the armies of the cross. 

From the borders of France the successful 
Peter led out sixty thousand fanatics. A poor 
soldier led on another band, and still another 
of twenty thousand started from Germany. 
Their path was followed by two hundred 
thousand more. 

But these wild hordes were those whom want 
and crime had made outlaws ; and the evils 
they inflicted on their way to Asia were cala- 
mities too grievous to bear, roused kingdoms to 
arm in self-defence against their fellow-Chris- 
tians, and suggest to us the necessity of such 
a drain upon European society to make a re- 
vival of true religion possible within its limits. 

After incredible crimes and sufferings, their 
lawless thousands reach Asia, and encounter 
the Turks in the vicinity of Nice. Here they 
all perish. A mausoleum was made of their 
bones on the plains near the city by the vic- 
torious Solyman. The princes and knights, the 
priests and peasants, that composed, after them, 
the better-disciplined armies of the cross, were 



166 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

men of Belial also, and providentially sepa- 
rated by their cruel and superstitious sympa- 
thies from the masses of a less intolerant and a 
more hopeful humanity. 

Those that took the cross and started for 
Asia are estimated at six millions. When this 
eruption of human beings passed in review be- 
fore the daughter of Alexius, she is said to have 
exclaimed, "Europe is loosened from her foun- 
dations and hurled against Asia." 

Before this mighty army Solyman.is totally 
defeated, flies in despair toward the Euphrates; 
and, from this period to the end of the Cru- 
sades, Asia becomes the battle-field of contend- 
ing nations and the charnel-house for their 
bones. 

The chivalry of Europe were governed by a 
law of exalted gallantry to ladies, and of pro- 
found and senseless veneration for the minis- 
ters of a religion whose badge they wore and 
whose holy places they rescued; but here ended 
the virtues of these grim and bloody Caleds of 
the North. 

Simon de Montfort, the beloved son and 
champion of the church, was a stanch mur- 
derer. Courtesy to a lady was a law of his 
knighthood; and on one occasion he pre- 
served several women from military outrage. 



THE CRUSADES. 167 

But the same Simon laid waste the country of 
the Albigenses with fire and sword ; and when 
the castle of Menerbe, on the frontiers of 
Spain, surrendered, for the single and only 
crime of constancy in their religious opinions,* 
this true specimen of Western chivalry united 
with the papal legate in arranging the fagots 
and in kindling the fire that burned to death a 
hundred and forty-one Christians of both sexes. 

"The sword of Godfrey divided a Turk 
from the shoulder to the haunch, and one-half 
of the infidel fell to the ground, while the 
other was transported by his horse to the city 
gate. As Eobert of Normandy rode against his 
antagonist, ' I devote thy head/ he piously 
exclaimed, 'to the demons of hell;' and that 
head was instantly cloven to the breast by the 
resistless stroke of his descending falchion. "f 

When Jerusalem fell into the hands of the 
Crusaders, Bohemond and Tancred, Baldwin, 
Godfrey, the Koberts, and others, the illus- 
trious leaders in the siege, followed by trains 
of devotees, and with heads and feet bare, as- 

* For the same offence, in this crusade against the 
Albigenses, a million were slain in France alone. Knights 
and Ecclesiastics united in the work of slaughter " with 
infinite joy." (See Sismondi's History.) 

-j- Gibbon, vol. v. p. 581. 



168 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

cended the slopes of Calvary to bedew with 
tears the precious sepulchre of the Lord, and 
to imprint their tenderest kisses on its walls. 

Incredible, however, to relate, these very 
men, so intensely Christian as to make even 
the rock touched once by the body of Jesus 
most sacred in their esteem, had just arisen 
from the banquet of blood, — had just massacred 
seventy thousand of all ages and sexes with- 
out mercy or discrimination. For three days 
the area of the slaughter-house stretched from 
wall to wall throughout Jerusalem. The cry 
for mercy and the crash of the battle-axe re- 
sounded on every side; and, thus reeking in 
the blood of recent murder, came these unre- 
lenting men up the sides of Calvary to worship 
the sepulchre. 

Such were the men, whose tender mercies 
were cruel, from whom Europe and the church 
had been delivered by the armies of the cross, 
that for one hundred and ninety years bound 
the sultanies. 



CHAPTER XXL 

PETER WALDO ON THE TRACK OF PETER THE 
HERMIT. 

"When Waldo, flying from the apostate West, 
In German wilds his righteous cause confess'd." 

Montgomery. 

Let us now turn to Zion in the wilderness ; 
and, while Ishmael takes peace from the world 
in Asia, it will be interesting to trace the pro- 
gress of the church left behind by that flood, 
of reprobate humanity disappearing in suc- 
cessive surges in Oriental aceldemas. 

Fifteen years after the commencement of 
the second Crusade, and forty-four years before 
the establishment of the Inquisition, a.d. 1206, 
there occurs a very interesting revival of re- 
ligion. 

To Peter Waldo is the church indebted for 
the first modern translation of the New Testa- 
ment in the vulgar tongue. This translation, 
and his apostolic zeal and success, made him 
the object of papal persecution. Himself and 

15 L 109 



170 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

followers fled from Lyons; and, as they went, 
they spread everywhere the principles and the 
impulses of the Keformation. The existing 
churches caught the spirit of their afflicted 
brethren, and the attack on Waldo became a 
wide-spread source of salvation. 

In the province of Picardy — the place of the 
nativity of Peter the Hermit, and on which 
region he drew most largely — Peter Waldo 
found a generation of right-minded men. Here 
his success was great, among a people that 
would not be induced to expel him or renounce 
his doctrine. 

Philip Augustus invaded this favoured spot, 
battered down three hundred houses and 
several walled towns, and pursued the flying 
converts into Flanders, where several suffered 
martyrdom. 

Peter himself escaped into Bohemia, another 
broad and beautiful valley drained of its 
bigots to recruit the armies of the cross. Here 
the word of God grew and multiplied. In 
Bulgaria, Croatia, Dalmatia, and Hungary, in 
Alsace, and along the valleys of the Khine, 
powerful revivals spread their healing influ- 
ence. Persecutions indeed arose; hundreds 
were imprisoned or slain ; but Christianity 
was not exterminated, as it was ultimately in 



PETER WALDO. 171 

Spain and Calabria, as it might well have been 
over all Europe but for the Crusades. 

In a.d. 1228, Reinerius Saccho, the Roman 
Inquisitor, represents their numbers to have 
been very great, the sect to have been most 
generally diffused through every part of Europe 
and found in all its circles. 

Certain French bishops "desired the monks 
of the Inquisition to defer a little their work 
of imprisonment till the Pope was advertised 
of the great numbers apprehended, — numbers 
so great that it was impossible to defray the 
charges of their subsistence, and even to pro- 
vide stone and mortar to build prisons for 
them."* But would such a difficulty in the 
work of extermination have stayed its pro- 
gress, had not the bigotry of Rome wasted its 
energies in its foreign wars ? 

Along the bloody trail of that demon army, 
had it been permitted to sweep through the 
Alps, we would not have gathered up a rem- 
nant from the papal slaughter-houses of eight 
hundred thousand Waldenses, nor would the 
blood of a million martyrs in the twelfth 
century have been the seed, but rather the 
grave, of the church. 

* Millner, vol. ii. p. 65. 



172 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

The four sultanies are bound for Zion's sake ; 
kept back from invading Europe, curbed with- 
in the valleys of the Euphrates, to subserve 
the purposes of salvation ; and the very hand 
that forges the restraints that bind them is the 
hand of a parricide, turned from the home 
his remorseless cruelty would otherwise have 
desolated, to grapple with Ishmael and perish 
at last himself in the fruitless struggle. 

The history of Ishmael, or of the Crusaders 
in their Asiatic wars, is but the recital of the 
outrages, the woes, and the strifes of ages. 

And, as the panorama opens in the fierce 
reprisals of the desert, or unfolds itself in the 
empire of the caliphs, or shifts again in the 
rise of the Turks or the wars of the cross, 
we have but the painful reproductions suc- 
cessively, with but little variation, of the same 
sad pictures of ruin. And from it we in- 
stinctively turn away. 

But, when the church is ever the centre of 
a thrilling interest in heavenly places, and men 
and wars and empires are made to be subsidiary 
to its preservation, (though they knew it not,) 
then the aspect of unalleviated violence and 
wrong is mitigated, and we watch that frail 
ark, now in the trough of the sea, and now on 
the crest of the surge, and now in the eddies 



PETER WALDO. 173 

of the Maelstrom, with an emotion of gratified 
wonder and veneration ; since, while one and 
another among the mighty disappear, — since 
Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome, the caliphs, 
and the Crusaders, struggle in vain in that wild 
uproar and are successively dashed upon the 
rocks, — that frail ark, invested with a protected 
life, piloted by an unseen hand, encounters 
and survives the same dangers, and is seen to 
emerge at last from the night of ages and the 
wreck of empires, itself unchanged, unharmed, 
as when first it was floated out and left to 
make its own perilous way across the dark 
and pathless ocean. 

Milton's wars of angels are invested with 
interest, since the good oppose the bad and 
triumph, and Heaven shines all the brighter 
for the trial of her imperilled and preserved 
virtue. And this it is that makes the world's 
prophetic history most interesting; since the 
bride, the Lamb's wife, is ever the centre of an 
amazing love, the ultimate care of a resistless 
Providence. Around her otherwise defence- 
less home the angels keep perpetual vigil, and 
in her palaces God is known for a refuge. 

And, while she is often at the very verge of 
an inevitable destruction, she is all the more 
pure for her trials and her triumphs. And we 

15* 



174 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

love for her sake to glance over earth's bloody 
annals, not simply to gather and chronicle the 
details of wars and wrongs, — subjects only and 
always revolting, — but for her sake, that we 
may gaze after her through the dark night 
and in the deep sea where she is ever followed 
by the outgoings of those feet once nailed to 
the cross for her sins and that ever tread down 
for her the fury of the waves. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

CONSTANTINOPLE MENACED. 

" Greece ! thine ancient lamp is spent : 
Thou art thine own monument." 

Montgomery. 

From a.d. 1063 — at which point of time we 
commence our reckoning of the hour, the day, 
the month, and the year, of this prophecy — to 
the fall of Constantinople, in a.d. 1453, there 
stretches an interval of three hundred and 
ninety-one years. 

The Crusaders lose Acre, the Holy Land, 
and disappear from Asia, in a.d. 1291, leav- 
ing the sultanies loose from their long-con- 
tinued restraints to rush forth upon abandoned 
Asia and impoverished Europe. No sooner do 
their foes disappear, than, true to their in- 
stincts, they begin to execute before the time 
their terrible mission. They at once spread 
their conquests over Romania, Anatolia, and 
across into Europe as far as the Danube. Con- 
stantinople is itself invested, and lies at the 
mercy of the foe. 

175 



176 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

"The third part of men" are thus unexpect- 
edly placed in imminent peril of being slain, 
and that long before the fulness of the pro- 
phetic hour. But Providence is always equal 
to all exigencies. Its prepared and reserved 
force rushes to the rescue of the helpless city 
and binds again the Euphratean angels. 

In a.d. 1356 — about forty-six years before 
Bajazet menaced the falling throne of the 
effeminate Csesars — a poor adventurer, escaped 
from prison, flings himself into the Oxus, and 
reaches with extraordinary exertions the op- 
posite bank. After leading for some time the 
life of an outlaw, he returned to his native 
Transoxiana. Here he gathered around him 
his little army and delivered his country from 
the usurpations of its conquerors. Ambition 
had already taken full possession of his soul, 
and the fortunate Tamerlane now began to 
aspire to the conquest of the world. 

In the message that he sent to Houssein,he 
expressed, while yet an inferior, his aspirations 
and his policies : — " He who wishes to embrace 
the bride of royalty must kiss her across the 
edge of the sharp sword." Guided by this 
maxim, he pursued his career of conquest till 
the twenty-seventh crown glittered on his 
head. 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 177 

From Samarcand to the forests of Siberia 
the successful Tartar stretched his conquests. 
Turning from thence, he recrossed the continent 
to the shores of the Indian Ocean, subduing 
every intervening kingdom by his resistless 
arms. 

When, ultimately, he became the proud 
master of this wide domain, he still panted for 
other and still more illustrious acquisitions. 
And, being told of the sudden and successful 
irruptions of the ambitious sultan, — of his de- 
signs upon the capital of the Caesars, — the tale 
inflamed his envy, and, leaving the banks of 
the Ganges, he determined to humble his rival 
in the fields of his triumphs. 

His military preparations were made upon a 
scale suited to the greatness and difficulty of 
the enterprise; and in due time his victorious 
army swept over the snow-clad hills of Georgia, 
and brought, as he intended, the line of his 
operations in conflict with those of Bajazet. 

And now opens the angry and menacing cor- 
respondence which issues in the defeat and 
ruin of the latter. " Thou art no more than a 
pismire: why wilt thou seek to provoke the 
elephant? Alas! they will trample thee 
under their feet," said the scornful Tamerlane. 
" If," replied Bajazet, with a sneer of studied 



178 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

insolence, " thou hast not courage to meet me 
in the field, mayest thou again receive thy 
wives after they have thrice endured the em- 
braces of strangers !" 

These were words of offence never to be for- 
gotten by the enraged Mogul. And, alas for 
Bajazet ! it was not his hour. And, as though 
in derision of his weakness and of his impudent 
haste, Providence gives him up to defeat and 
ruin. He is taken prisoner by Tamerlane, put 
in an iron cage, and made a spectacle to Asia 
and the world. 

The bonds that had so long bound the sul- 
tanies had been snapped in the disappearance 
of the Crusaders. The Turks had broken forth 
to anticipate the will of Heaven and fulfil be- 
fore the time their bloody mission ; but the 
strong arm of the Mogul is lifted up from the 
distant Ganges, and the daring Bajazet is 
caught like a wild beast escaped from the 
menagerie, and recaged in the neighbourhood 
of the doomed capital. 

And now, if ever, the fierce Tartar is in the 
very position to become the proud master of 
the East and the West. But, strange to relate, 
in the very vicinity of the empire-city, and at 
the period and in the very conjuncture most 
propitious, and still filled with the long-che- 



CONSTANTINOPLE MENACED. 179 

rished desire for the world's subjugation, he 
most unaccountably turns from the key of 
power, from the city's protected walls, — and 
his victorious hordes vanish forever in the dis- 
tant East. 

Both Tamerlane and Bajazet were devout 
Mohammedans, sympathized with each other 
in their opposition to an idolatrous church, and 
alike desired the fall of Greece and Borne. 
United, two of the best generals of their times, 
and they at the head of a combined army of 
twelve hundred thousand men, would have 
appeared in the field, and not only Constanti- 
nople, but exhausted Europe, must have formed 
at last on her Atlantic slopes the western ter- 
minus of the Mohammedan empire. 

Such spirits, however, could not unite ; and 
Christendom escaped because the processes of 
the assigned preparation could not be com- 
pleted until the time of the end. 

Scarcely had this vision of approaching doom 
vanished, when others became equally appal- 
ling and imminent, and imploring cries for aid 
were spread over the West. But the West had 
already wasted their best energies in a strife 
in which they had won and lost a tomb at 
an incalculable sacrifice. 

And neither was the West filled any longer 



180 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

with bigoted men ready to fly to arms on the 
first summons. That generation had passed 
away. The rust had dissolved their armour 
and death had congealed their blood. 

The great schism also, in which three papal 
bishops claimed each for himself the pontificate, 
had augmented the general apathy ; and, though 
unity had been restored, in the election of 
Martin the Fifth, and in his ascension to the 
chair of St. Peter, a.d. 1417, still, emotions 
of deep dissatisfaction pervaded the masses. 
The union was the harmony of electric clouds, 
exposed at every turn of the wind to an ex- 
plosion that would scatter them again. 

The confederate kingdoms of the West had, 
many of them, united in earnestly demanding 
the reformation of the church in its " head and 
in its members." The Council of Constance, 
which had assembled for the ostensible purpose 
of carrying out the popular wish, sent John 
Huss and Jerome of Prague to the stake, re- 
moved from office the three contending popes, 
and elected Martin the Fifth as their successor. 
But, alas ! this was all : no other reformation 
occurred. It had been promised; but, still, all 
the evils complained of continued to reign. 

Mutual confidence had been lost; no one 
could trust another. Social honour and do 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 181 

mestic happiness had alike disappeared. Jus- 
tice had wholly forsaken the councils of the 
church, and, indeed, all the tribunals which 
were under the reach and rule of the clergy. 
True piety, outraged and wronged, saw its 
ablest and purest defenders perish at the stake 
or vanish in the dungeons of the Inquisition. 

The few controlled the many. They were 
in power ; and the popular conscience, without 
an organization in which it could gain indi- 
viduality and utterance, broke forth only in 
its desultory and abortive expostulations. 

But still there prevailed everywhere the deep 
impressions of unredressed grievances, of un- 
atoned wrong; and therefore the power, if even 
the will had existed, to revive the fanaticism 
of a previous age once more, had disappeared 
forever. 

A new class of religious teachers and influ- 
ences were weakening everywhere the bands of 
Rome. New ideas, in the bosoms of thousands, 
were beginning to struggle into life and to call 
for other leaders in church and state of more 
hopeful and holier sympathies. 

An apathy with respect to the perpetual 
encroachments of the Turks had, in conse- 
quence, spread itself over the entire West. 

Such was at this time the state of the popu- 



182 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

lar mind, that Peter the Hermit, had he been 
reproduced, must have failed to have made 
any considerable general impression. And if 
the perfidious Martin, or the corrupt ministers 
of a communion rendered execrable by its 
shameless impieties, had attempted to raise an 
army to defend the altars of the East from the 
desecration of Islamism, the effort would have 
been met with an emotion akin to a desire for 
a change even to the latter as the more hope- 
ful regime. 

Popery had become a worn-out harlot, whose 
shameless effrontery shocked even the common 
sentiments of natural religion, and on whose 
withered cheek there was no blush. 

When, therefore, Tamerlane left the op- 
pressed sultanies, he left them without an 
enemy in the field. The tempest from Europe 
had expended its rage in Asia ; the wars of the 
cross had ended, and the fierce Mogul had be- 
come lost to all further thoughts of the world's 
subjugation. He had slept his last sleep on 
his way to China. In that sleep he dreamed 
no more of battles and sieges. 

The tendency in the several sultanies after 
these events was steadily and firmly toward 
a union of their forces. Having for so many 
years experienced the evils of dissension, their 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 183 

leading minds kept ever in view, amid the 
sharp and bloody debates of the successors of 
the fallen sultan, the great advantages that 
would accrue to them on a permanent cessa- 
tion of all domestic feuds. To the great joy 
of all, these terminated with the fall of the last 
pretender to the throne of Bajazet. 

From this period, (a.d. 1421,) Providence gave 
to the Ottomans successful leaders and armies 
of disciplined and available courage. 

Mohammed the Second, son of Amurath, 
ascended the throne in the twenty-first year of 
his age. His infant brothers were ruthlessly 
slain, and the insubordination of the janizaries 
was taught to respect a master who knew how 
to revenge an affront and how to direct and 
exhaust their wild and fierce animosities. 
Seven thousand useless falconers were turned 
into citizens or soldiers, and the expenses of 
a luxurious court made to minister to his am- 
bitious desire, — a desire that fixed and ex- 
pended itself solely on the conquest of Con- 
stantinople. 

To this all things else bowed and contri- 
buted. The pleasures of his youth were for- 
gotten and absorbed in the workings of a 
mightier passion. It impelled him in the day- 
time to extraordinary efforts, and broke his 



184 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

rest at night. His very clemency was studied. 
His gifts of gold, titles, or place, alike pointed 
the soldier to the walls of the coveted city. 
His very words burned with an enthusiasm 
which communicated to his army a correspond- 
ing emotion, and his whole kingdom resounded 
with the din of hostile preparations. 

About five miles from Constantinople, on the 
European side of the Bosphorus, he erected a 
strong castle. The Greeks became alarmed 
when they saw thus boldly thrown aside even 
the mask of peace. They ventured to expos- 
tulate by their ambassadors. "Return in 
safety," said the inflexible chief, "but the 
next who delivers a similar message may ex- 
pect to be flayed alive. "* 

* Gibbon, vol. vi. p. 375. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE. 

'* Then the mighty pour'd their breath ; 
Slaughter feasted on the brave : 
'Twas the carnival of death ; 
'Twas the vintage of the grave." 

The Turks were celebrated — as have ever 
been the Saracens before them — for their nu- 
merous armies of horsemen. These, in pre- 
vious centuries, had been their sole reliance in 
war. Reposing in the daytime, their stealthy 
advance upon the unguarded frontiers of de- 
voted countries was made at night. Its silence 
was broken by the quick tramp of their pant- 
ing cavalry. The falling dew cooled the ar- 
dour of their blood, and moonlit plains facili- 
tated their approach. Long before the daAvn, 
the shout of battle woke the sleepers to man 
walls already scaled, — to guard gates already 
entered by the victors. 

While the Crusaders relied on their horses 
of massive proportions, steel armour, heavy 
swords, spears, and battle-axes, the Saracen and 

16* M 185 



1SG ISIIMAEL AND THE CIIURCII. 

Turk had hitherto relied on the use of their 
sharp scimitars, and on the light-footed, swift 
steeds of the desert. With them, the onset, 
the retreat, and the sudden onset again, to be 
again followed by a retreat and a return to the 
struggle, were but the ordinary evolutions of 
the battle-field. 

In this sort of warfare they were always 
superior to the Christians. But, when brought 
to close quarters, when the horse could not 
any longer aid their courage, they fell before 
the stronger arm of steel-clad knights. They 
were known as warriors formidable in the 
saddle and in fields suited to the operations 
of an army of trained horsemen, but as in- 
efficient in hand-to-hand fights. 

These armies appeared often incredibly 
numerous. Frequent attempts were made to 
estimate the probable numerical force that 
followed the invader; and at such times, 
ordinarily, the alarms of fear aided the ex- 
aggerations of the fancy. And, while all 
agreed in stating the number as that of 
myriads, it was quite impossible to count 
accurately the scattered and rushing squad- 
rons, for they were seen transiently and at 
different points on a frontier of many hundred 
miles. 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 1S7 

The estimates ranged usually at from two 
hundred thousand to six hundred thousand; 
or, in the language of John, "two hundred 
thousand thousand/' — a very large, indefinite 
number, impossible accurately to enumerate, 
yet oppressing the imagination by the vastness 
of their supposed destructive capabilities. 

But, when Mohammed environed Constanti- 
nople and took it, not only the horse, but also 
the battering-rams of other days, had become 
quite insignificant in comparison with the 
newly-discovered engine of destruction em- 
ployed by the conqueror. 

" Von Hammer states that he had himself 
seen the great cannon of the Dardanelles, in 
which a tailor who had run away from his 
creditors had concealed himself several days/'* 
A cannon, it is said, was cast for Mohammed, 
in which the measure of twelve palms was 
assigned to the bore, and which propelled a 
stone bullet of six hundred pounds' weight the 
distance of a mile, when it buried itself a 
fathom deep in the ground.*)* 

Anciently, walled towns were not built to 
resist cannon. The fortifications were con- 
sidered sufficient if battering-rams would fail to 

* Gibbon, vol. vi. p. 380. \ Ibid. 



188 ISIDIAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

overthrow them. Constantinople could with- 
stand these ; but when its walls were struck 
by the resistless hail that issued from amid 
the fire and smoke and brimstone of the 
Turkish batteries, and from an army of two 
hundred and fifty thousand horse and foot, 
they rapidly crumbled into breaches impos- 
sible to be repaired or defended. 

The Turkish horse, as they swept through 
the villages and subdued the surrounding 
country to the very gates of the city, were 
enveloped in a cloud that gave to them an 
appalling indistinctness. 

One unused to such scenes, and not under- 
standing the precise nature of the phenomena, 
could but say, " Thus I saw the horses in the 
vision and them that sat on them, having breast- 
plates of fire, and of jacinth, and of brim- 
stone ;" {i. e. the red, blue, and yellow, in the 
unique costume of the soldiers composing this 
strange army.) "And the heads of the horses 
were as the heads of lions, and out of their 
mouths issued fire, and smoke, and brim- 
stone." 

Forty days the lines of cavalry performed 
their evolutions, supported the batteries, ap- 
proached and retired, and incessantly dis- 
charged their muskets over the heads of the 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 189 

horses. It appeared to John that the stream 
of fire and smoke issued from the infuriated 
animals themselves. They, with their riders, 
would for a moment become visible, and seem 
all the more terrible for the indistinctness with 
which they were seen and for the incessant 
volleys that thundered from their extended 
lines, enwrapping the open plain alternately 
in sulphureous flames or pitchy darkness. 

To the apostle it was not given to know 
what powder and ball were. It was given 
him to be a spectator of the novel spectacle, 
to behold the smoke, fire, and brimstone, and 
to know that by these were the third part of 
men killed. What this new source of destruc- 
tion might be he knew not ; but, in prophetic 
vision, Ishmael was the first who was seen to 
employ it in battering down the walls of a 
city; and John saw him rising up in the 
second woe, enwrapped in clouds of enraged 
brimstone, which he somehow hurled with ter- 
rible effect upon the besieged. 

The long rows of black ordnance, looking 
like large boas, were stretched out at full 
length on the tops of the numerous batteries. 
Cannon have been frequently ornamented by 
the founder with various devices according to 
his fancy; and that these were made at their 



190 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

breeches with a coil like a serpent's tail, and at 
their muzzles in the form of a serpent's head, 
is not improbable. 

One of these, cast by order of the sultan at 
Adrianople, was of enormous size. Sixty oxen 
were required for its transportation. It had a 
fellow on each side of it nearly its equal. One 
hundred and fifty of these engines of ruin, of 
different sizes, were reported as stretching their 
black lengths on each battery; and fourteen 
of these batteries blazed at once against the 
tumbling walls. " Their tails," said the pro- 
phet, "were like unto serpents', and had heads, 
and with them they do hurt." 

The Turks use a standard surmounted by a 
crescent and adorned with one or more tails or 
tufts of hair from the tail of a horse. The 
number of these tails indicate the number of 
pachalics under the rule of the chief whose 
ensign it is, and, of course, his rank and power. 
Many find in this fact an illustration of the 
passage respecting the heads and tails with 
which the hurt was seen to have been done. 

The names of the invaders are not given to 
John. The details are, nevertheless, sufficient. 
The whole scene appears before him as a tran- 
sient vision. The third part of men are slain, 
and he is made to see and to describe the sad 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 191 

event as it presented itself to him, simply as a 
spectator. 

No actor in the strife knows much about 
what is occurring at a little distance from him ; 
and, in describing a siege or a battle, you are 
obliged to collect a number of individual ad- 
ventures and observations, so as to form a 
pretty correct picture of the whole by com- 
bining and comparing them with one another. 
This is the office of the historian. But the 
prophet gives you briefly a correct picture of 
the general scene, without descending to inci- 
dental details beyond what would be necessary 
to identify the event intended. 

John surveys at one view the whole field of 
strife. He notices the army. It is composed 
of cavalry; he hears its estimated numbers, — 
myriads of myriads. He observes the military 
costume of the Turkish soldiers, in which the 
colours of red, blue, and yellow predominate. 
He beholds the smoke, fire, and brimstone 
enveloping the army, — an unprecedented phe- 
nomena; the appearance of the horses, when, 
at the discharge of musketry over their heads, 
streams of fire and brimstone seemed to issue 
from their mouths; and the cannon, with 
muzzles like serpents' heads and breeches like 
serpents' tails. With an army and with means 



192 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

of ruin thus unique, he saw that the third 
part of men were killed. 

Gibbon attributes the loss of the city, at the 
juncture in which it occurred, to a wound 
which John Justiniana received from a bullet 
or an arrow that pierced his gauntlet. He 
fled in pain and despair from the walls which, 
up to that moment, he had so bravely defended. 

The Latin auxiliaries followed his example. 
Such pusillanimity at such a time proved fatal. 
It was perceived by the watchful foe, and the 
untiring Mohammed flew along his lines, — the 
angel of death to the fearful, and with the re- 
wards of provinces and of paradise to the 
courageous and successful soldier who should 
first mount the breaches. 

The Turks redoubled their exertions. Their 
battle-shout resounded anew amid the roar, 
the smoke, the blaze, of fourteen hundred can- 
non and myriads of small-arms. "La I'laha 
ilia Alia ! Mohammed Resoul Allah !" " There 
is but one God ! Mohammed is the prophet of 
God !" The walls are prostrated; the breaches 
are entered ; Constantine, the last of the Csesars, 
is slain ; and on the twenty-ninth day of May, 
A.D. 1453, Mohammed, surrounded by his 
viziers, pachas, and guards, enters the fallen city 
in triumph. From that hour the capital of the 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 193 

East became the capital of the Ottoman em- 
pire. 

The Saracens tormented those that had not 
the seal of God in their foreheads, but left 
them in the possession often of their homes, a 
subdued and a tributary people. The Turks 
went further, — occupied as proprietors the ter- 
ritories of the Greek church, and divided it 
among themselves. The Greeks left their 
homes and fled to the West. 

The Turks were prepared to slay the third 
part of men, — to destroy the Greek empire. 
And from their establishment in Bagdad, a.d. 
1063, to the conquest of Constantinople, a.d. 
1453, there stretches out just the prophetic 
interval named by John : — " an hour, a day, a 
month, and a year," or a fraction over three 
hundred and ninety-one years, — the exact 
time assigned to the appointed restraint and 
preparation. At the consummation of this 
defined interval, the ruin is complete, and the 
Empire of the East disappears forever from the 
map of Europe. 



17 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

THE MISSION OF ISHMAEL ONE OF STRIFE. 

" He came, he went, like the simoom, — 
That harbinger of fate and gloom 
Beneath whose widely-wasting breath 
The very cypress droops to death." 

Byron. 

We have now surveyed a period of about 
eight hundred and fifty years, during which 
the great disturber and destroyer of the world's 
peace, and that on a scale most stupendous, 
has been Ishmael. His hand, since his scat- 
tered and isolated tribes gained a great nation- 
ality in Mohammed, has been against every man. 
He has roused the nations to arms in all ages. 

His creed opposes him alike to Pagan, Jew, 
and Christian. His method of propagating it 
leads him ever to study and practise the art 
of war. When the religious sentiment is the 
strongest, his fierce martial spirit is at its 
height and his enterprises most comprehensive. 

His Saracenic conquests involved the world 
in the strifes of centuries. When his decayed 
manhood revived again in the sultanies of the 

194 



ISHMAEL S MISSION. 195 

Euphrates, his bloody trumpet for three hun- 
dred and ninety-one years startled the re- 
motest tribes and countries. Its challenge 
brought the Crusaders from Europe in millions, 
and the vast armies of Saladin from Africa, 
and finally the mighty host of Tamerlane from 
the setting sun, to meet him in the field of 
carnage. During all this interval he was ever 
the great disturbing influence, breaking forever 
the whole world's harmonies. 

The conquests of Alexander the Great ex- 
tended over a part of Asia. His progress was 
that of a courier rather than that of a con- 
queror. He died at the early age of thirty, 
without issue to occupy his vacant throne. 

The Goths and Vandals conquered Italy, 
drove the Caesars to Constantinople, and merged 
their nationality in that of the Romans. But 
the wars of Ishmael have been carried into 
every quarter of the globe; and, while he has 
absorbed other nationalities, he has never lost 
his own. 

Christian, Jew, or Pagan, were alike the ob- 
jects of his religious animosities, and their ex- 
termination alike grateful to his bloody creed. 
Others warred from ambition, for revenue, ex- 
tension of territory, but Ishmael for these as 
secondary grounds of invasion and conquest. 



196 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

His prophet and his God invoked his combative 
spirit into a fiercer life by higher incentives ; 
spread out before him the fields, the fountains, 
the gardens, the lovely women, of the upper 
paradise, to warm the ardour of his blood and 
to turn him into both a fanatic and a soldier. 
In him the war-spirit became the nourished 
offspring of a religious sentiment animated by 
interest and temperament. Hence it is that 
the prophecy receives a fulfilment truly won- 
derful and literal in his history. 

Strife is his destiny. He was recently en- 
gaged at his accustomed work; succeeded in 
drawing into the field of carnage with himself 
three of the most powerful transatlantic na- 
tionalities. The war-cloud that but yesterday 
hung heavy and dark over the Black Sea was 
spread by his murderous hand. Those bones 
that bleach on the bloody heights of Alma, In- 
kermann, and Sebastopol, were gathered and 
piled by him. 

He sowed discord in the family of the pa- 
triarch : God has doomed him to discord ever 
since. It is his stereotyped character, chroni- 
cled in the annals of every age; and the sad 
issue is, that it shall be his end. His national 
being shall perish at last just as it rose : — in 
a sea of blood. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

THE PROVIDENTIAL WARNING DISREGARDED. 

Thy harden'd clieek in -wrinkles set 
The contrite tear hath never yvet ; 
And darker grows and darker yet 
The shadows of the minaret, 
Portentous of thy doom. 

The fall of the Empire of the East was 
Heaven's menace to the West. But, when the 
warning admonition spread through Christen- 
dom, it produced — painful to relate — no re- 
formation. 

The Council of Constance had had its gath- 
erings and its deliberations ; but its prolonged 
sittings had been to no good purpose. Other 
councils were called to reform the church " in 
its head and in its members," but equally in 
vain. The recurrence of such councils was 
finally prevented by a formal denial of their 
authority. 

The idolatry of the church also remained 
not only unchanged, but on the increase, in 
the number of devils, demons, or sainted dead 

17* 197 



198 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

who were canonized and made objects of reli- 
gious veneration. Relics were multiplied; holy 
bones and garments, crucifixes of wood, stone, 
gold, silver, and brass, rose at every crossing, 
surmounted every sanctuary, hung upon every 
bosom; and idolatry became every day more 
and more visible and intolerable. 

The murders committed by Innocent III. 
on the Albigenses, the awful tortures of the 
Inquisition, the streams of righteous blood that 
had been shed, and that had for successive 
ages purpled the Rhine, the Rhone, and the 
rivers and fountains of the Ligurian Alps, were 
still stains of guilt unwashed by the tears of 
repentance or by the blood of atonement. 

When the Council of Constance held its 
prolonged sittings, it reformed not, it repented 
not, but lured to its den of deceit and cruelty 
the pure and zealous Huss, and the eloquent 
and learned Jerome of Prague. Their true 
and enlightened piety was adjudged to be their 
crime. They testified not against the priests 
as priests, but they testified against them as 
bad men. Promises of safe conduct were 
shamelessly violated. They were imprisoned, 
and finally burned at the stake. 

In this council there were no regrets for the 
past. It destroj^ed the books of WiclifFe ; vio- 



WARNING DISREGARDED. 199 

la ted his resting-place to bum his bones, that 
it might show every possible indignity to the 
memory of the just. In the most solemn 
manner did the emperor, his court and nobles, 
surrounded by kings and princes, by popes and 
cardinals, by every centre of influence and re- 
sponsibility in church and state, in a vast 
oecumenical council, justify in a formal and 
solemn declaration, practically and publicly 
made, the acts of violence, oppression, and 
murder, which had for ages cried to Heaven 
for redress. 

To warn these guilty generations of the ap- 
proaching retribution if they repented not, 
the Eastern estates of the church were sub- 
verted, the third part of men slain. 

The warning, however, was unheeded. The 
outrages against Huss and Jerome were fol- 
lowed by persecutions against their numerous 
followers ; and up to the time of the great Re- 
formation of the sixteenth century nothing is 
more obvious than the continued impenitence 
and increasing corruptions of the Roman church: 
— her sorceries or pretended miracles, — her for- 
nications, too gross even for Mohammedan con- 
sciences, — her thefts, obtaining money on false 
pretences by the sale of indulgences, — all con- 
tinued to be practised and to increase in their 



200 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

shameless effrontery up to the time cf Tetzel's 
conflict with the indignant Luther. 

And even now, with all the light of three 
hundred years poured upon Europe, her papal 
kingdoms are still full of darkness; and the 
whole civilized world has been called with 
pain to hear of the deification of the Virgin 
Mary, — to see her made, in the dogmas of 
Rome, the fourth person in the Godhead. 

"And the rest of the men which were not 
killed by these plagues yet repented not of the 
works of their hands, that they should not 
worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, 
and brass, and stone, and of wood; which 
neither can see, nor hear, nor walk : neither 
repented they of their murders, nor of their 
sorceries, nor of their fornications, nor of their 
thefts."* 

* Rev. ix. 20. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

THE ANTECEDENTS OF THE REFORMATION. 

"A hundred years hence ye shall render an account of your 
doings to God and to me." — John Huss before his judges. 

"When Jesus ascended to heaven a bright 
cloud received him out of sight. In the vision 
of John* which immediately followed that of 
the second woe, he reappears, surrounding 
himself with the tokens of a departed deluge. 
The bow is painted on the cloud in which he 
is clothed, and by which we are assured that, 
whatever alternations in the future might oc- 
cur, yet the church should not again be sur- 
rounded and overwhelmed by the flood of a 
universal ungodliness. 

In the great apostasies which had succeeded 
the joyous progress of a primitive Christianity, 
the world had lost its balance. Its vast reser- 
voirs of depravity had emptied their basins, 
and the ruined hulk had floated on for ages in 

* Kev. x. 1. 

N 201 



202 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

its starless and desolate track. But the in- 
timations now are, in this new vision, that it 
is turning back again on its own axis, and that 
it should never fall in a similarly disastrous 
manner from its zone. 

The bow on the cloud is the symbol of a 
receding flood. The angel's face also is like 
the sun rising on the ark on the morning of 
that day in which it was opened. The mists 
of the mediaeval night were vanishing, and the 
green and joyous earth was seen rising once 
more above the loosened fountains of the great 
deep. The open book in his mighty hand, it 
is intimated also, could not be closed again a 
second time as it had been, upborne as it was 
by such a hand, and that, too, amid the lumi- 
nous and irresistable outgoings of his mighty 
providence on land and sea. If the land 
should prove less favourable where his left foot 
less firmly and less favourably rested, then the 
sea should prove more propitious to the exodus 
of his hying people into a better land. 

In this manner is introduced to us the next 
great series of events occasioned by the con- 
quests of Ishmael, — viz. : the dispersion of the 
expatriated Greeks over the kingdoms of the 
West, and the consequent spread and popu- 
larity of the language in which the Scriptures 



TIIE REFORMATION. 203 

were written and from which they were to be 
translated, the discovery of the art of printing 
and of a new continent, and the exodus of the 
church, together with the death and resurrec- 
tion of the witnesses, — events that culminate at 
the disappearance of the second woe. At the 
close of the prophet's narrative respecting these, 
it is said, without any other regard to time 
and manner as to the occurrence, and just as 
though it had been simply incidental, " The 
second woe is past." 

So the husbandman, annoyed by the marsh 
spreading its stagnant basins for leagues around, 
sees on a sudden the lake that feeds it escape 
from the hill and rush to the sea. The head- 
long plunge of that resistless torrent completely 
rivets his attention. He does not observe that, 
at the same time, the pestilential marsh has 
also been drained. He sees the lake dried up, 
the torrent shrunk to a little rivulet, creeping 
silently along in the bottom of the torn chan- 
nel, and finally discovers also, and with grati- 
tude, that the spongy soil of the marsh has 
become arable land. 

In like manner the attention of the disciple 
is perfectly absorbed by the amazing scenes 
that were passing before him. The vision of 
the angel with an open book, of the witnesses 



204 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

and their fortunes, of the fall of the tenth part 
of the city, — these obliterate for the time the 
recollections of the past and turn off his eye 
from contemporaneous occurrences. But, when 
he recovers his self-possession, he perceives also 
that these mighty changes have borne away 
the second woe, and he exclaims, " The second 
woe is past." 

In order, therefore, to reach the event, — viz. : 
this disappearance of the second woe,* — it will 
be necessary to follow in the track of the pro- 
phet through the causes that immediately pre- 
cede and produce it. 

The great Eeformation of the sixteenth cen- 
tury is one of these. It influences, finally and 
fatally, the destiny of the second woe; while, 
at the same time, its origin is in the second 
woe as one of its remote causes, and its best 
successes were secured by the indirect aid of 
the worst forms of that woe : — 

" It was commanded [the Saracens] that they 
should not hurt the grass of the field, neither 
any green thing, neither any tree; but only 
those men that have not the seal of God in 
their foreheads." While the injuries inflicted 
were not to fall on Zion, they were to fall on 

* The fall of the Ottoman empire. 



THE REFORMATION. 205 

her foes, — were to employ and absorb their de- 
structive energies, to suspend, and confound 
their cruel policies. Zion, in the mean time, 
was to escape, — was to be the spectator of a 
conflict in which the wild beasts had left the 
prey to devour each other. 

This in a good degree proved true also with 
respect to the Ottomans. The barbarous lords 
of the Eastern capital despised the culture of 
its educated sons, desecrated their altars, and 
buried their hopes in the tomb in which they 
had buried the last of the Csesars 

The consequent dispersion of the Greeks be- 
came a great event of those times. The weep- 
ing exiles spread themselves through Europe. 
Their superior refinement and ruined fortunes 
awakened universal sympathy. Their elegant 
manners were imitated, their language studied, 
and their shining and solid attainments placed 
them at the head of Western universities and 
awakened the emulation of the Latins. New 
ideas expanded the soul, and unaccustomed 
voices broke the slumber of ages. 

Among the patrons of learning, the church 
of Rome at this time was most conspicuous. 
By her learned Erasmus was the Greek text 
purified and prepared for the use of her Pro- 
testant foes; by her treasures were teachers 

18 



206 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

sustained and institutions endowed; and by 
her hand, all unconscious of the tendency of 
her own acts, was the dark pall lifted from 
the sun. Its glance was day; the revelations 
appalling. 

Alarmed at the outcry from the exposure 
of her sores and her sorceries, she from that 
hour sought to hide her shame in the covert 
of her gloomy den. The fruitful source of 
religious error and of political anarchy was all 
at once discovered by her to have been in the 
revival of letters and in the spread of free 
opinions. She therefore addressed herself with 
energy to the work of reversing the alarming 
tendency; but in vain. The dike was broken, 
the sea was let loose, and its irresistible surges 
went where she would not. 

The extreme depravity of the popes, car- 
dinals, and religious orders, served also to 
strengthen the tendencies toward the Keforma- 
tion. A good cause cannot but suffer from the 
evil conduct of its advocates, since the masses 
are superficial, and judge a system rather by 
its fruits than by its principles. But when, 
while impiety and immorality is most rife and 
most unblushing in the church, her very prin- 
ciples are themselves assailed by the wisest and 
the purest citizens, and held to be the fruitful 



THE REFORMATION. 207 

sources of "murders, sorceries, fornications, 
and thefts," the long-cherished feeling of vene- 
ration could not but give place to that of dis- 
trust and abhorrence. Her continued impeni- 
tence aided more than all other causes put 
together to quicken the insulted consciences 
of the people, and to awaken their confidence 
in the proffered aid of a holier ministration. 

Our religious prejudices are extremely stern 
and sensitive. And when Kome trifled with 
these, broke her promises, and continued in 
sin, she isolated herself more than ever from 
popular sympathies. The ties of her power 
were loosened and fell off at every stride she 
took in the opposite direction. 

Oppression served but to aggravate the 
rising animosity. Books might be burned, 
and bold spirits pay for their temerity with 
their lives ; but the spirit of reform could not 
be allayed by this course. It was already a 
living sentiment in the minds of thousands. 
It rose stern and inflexible, and made some 
great change imminent and inevitable. 

But Rome was never more conscious of 
safety. She rode a sea whose agitated surface 
concealed the strength and the depth of the 
wave that convulsed underneath. Repentance 
would have awakened confidence ; but, with a 



208 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

fatal disregard to her character for purity 
as the source of her influence, she threw 
off the last reserves of decency, and assailed 
in here and there a popular leader, every day 
renewedly, some one of the great and fa- 
vourite ideas of the people. It was a policy 
most suicidal. The fall of every fresh victim 
offended more deeply than ever the enlightened 
consciences of men, and served but to prepare 
them for the testimony of the true witnesses 
whenever the sacred volume should at length 
be fully opened in the vulgar tongue. 

The cruelties of Rome tended also in the 
same direction. There is in providence a just 
resentment, often marked and palpable even 
in this life, against great social wrongs, and 
especially against those of murder. And not 
the less sure and terrible are its reprisals, 
even though the murder be committed under 
the forms of law, in the holy name of religion, 
and on the plea of a social or a moral ne- 
cessity. 

The blood of Huss cried from the ground. 
Armies sprang into being at that cry to avenge 
his death ; and the seeds of the great Reforma- 
tion were quickened into a more vigorous 
germination by the ashes of the martyr. The 
interference of the Bohemian nobles was all 



THE REFORMATION. 200 

emotional, all uncalculatiiig. It was indeed 
but the first excited throb of a sympathetic 
* humanity, — nevertheless most certain to settle 
down ultimately into purposes of deliberate 
and organized retaliation. 

" Ye have put him to a cruel and an igno- 
minious death," said they, "though convicted 

of no heresy Ye have also unmercifully 

imprisoned, and perhaps already put to death, 
Jerome of Prague, — a man of most profound 
learning and copious eloquence. Him also ye 

have condemned unconvicted We are 

resolved to sacrifice our lives for the defence 
of the gospel of Christ and of his faithful 
preachers." Such was the stern remonstrance 
of the indignant nobles; and for thirteen years 
Bohemia terribly avenged her martyrs in the 
Hussite war. 

It was in after-ages urged that the safe- 
conduct granted to Luther ought not to be 
regarded : — " that the Rhine should receive 
his ashes, as it had received those of Huss a 
century ago." But the proposition was re- 
garded by the Elector of Saxony with an emo- 
tion of horror. "It," said he, "has brought 
too many misfortunes on the German "nation 
fjr us ever to raise such a scaffold the second 
time." 

18* 



210 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

That scaffold is an imperishable chronicle 
in the annals of time. Even the cry of the 
furious bishops, when Huss refused to recant,* 
still rings in our ears and enrages our blood. 
" ' He is a malicious and hardened heretic ! 
Down, down from the platform!' With a 
black and weighty chain around his neck, he 

was fastened to the stake The wood 

having been consumed, the corpse continued 
suspended on the stake ; and the executioners, 
having brought an additional quantity of fuel, 
thrust both stake and corpse anew into the 

fire, which consumed the whole The 

Papists dug out the hole for a considerable 
space around, conveyed away the earth and 
ashes in carts, and cast the whole into the 
Rhine."* 

" The blood of the martyrs has ever been 
the seed of the church." She has fallen in 
one country but to rise in another ; and over 
that "plaf'f where she fell God has ever 
emptied a vial and spread a troubled cloud. 
On that cloud the Elector had fixed his 
anxious gaze. It still hung there, (so it 
seemed to him,) skirted with fire and drip- 

* " History of the TValdenses/' vol. ii. pp. 2-4, 25 
+ 2 Kings ix. 26. 



THE REFORMATION. 211 

ping with intense wrath, over the stake of 
Huss. The calamities of a century had not 
made expiation; and he would not for the 
wealth of an empire see Germany •" raise such 
a scaffold a second time." 

The bleeding remnant of the Albigenses also 
found their way into all the countries of Eu- 
rope. Their persecutors, though they had 
driven them from their native valleys, had to 
meet them again in the Wicliffites, the Huss- 
ites, the Lutherans and the Calvinists, of 
after-times. Such are the laws of Providence. 
But still the church could never have suc- 
ceeded to any considerable extent in the peace- 
ful utterance of her blessed testimony without 
the discovery of some new world, in which 
she might have an unobstructed growth, and 
some new appliance which, like the inspiration 
of the primitive age, would reproduce the 
word, despite every effort to destroy it. 

When inspiration ceased, the early church, 
having but little access to the pure word of 
God, dwindled amid surrounding corruptions 
and oppressions, and at the end of the third 
century was thought to have been almost 
extinct. From that period to the beginning 
of the sixteenth century it steadily declined, 
and has often been on the very verge of ruin. 



212 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

Asia, Africa, Europe, were all lost to her in 
the total apostasy of her professed friends; 
and the small remnant of her desolate children 
wandered about in sheep-skins and goat-skins 
in the fastnesses of inaccessible mountains 
and in the solitudes of wildernesses, prolong- 
ing a precarious and an afflicted life amid all 
uncertainties and all sufferings. 

The causes that tended toward the great 
Reformation and that urged it forward, except- 
ing those yet to be named, had all existed 
in previous ages, under equally favourable 
circumstances; and all had proved abortive. 
Charles, when he regretted that he had not 
slain Luther at Worms, and thus had strangled 
the Reformation in its cradle, judged incor- 
rectly of the influence of that event; because 
this reformation, unlike any other since the time 
of ihe apostles, connected itself with the art 
of printing and with the discovery of a new 
continent. These gave to the church a van- 
tage-ground which Providence had never given 
her before: these will require, therefore, a par- 
ticular review. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

THE ART OF PRINTING AND THE REFORMATION. 

" That church, o'erborne, depress'd, -unpeopled, dead, 
Oft from the dust of ruin raised its head." 

Montgomery. 

In God's economy, a knowledge of the gospel 
is made essential to salvation. Men cannot 
see without light; nor can they believe in 
Christ without a knowledge of the word which 
reveals him. " How can they believe in him 
of whom they have not heard ?" As the lan- 
guages in which the Scriptures were written 
ceased to be spoken, the call for a transla- 
tion of them into the vulgar tongue became 
imperative. Translations, however, required 
great labour and great erudition. A copy of 
the Bible, fully written out, would require ten 
months of close application ; and such a copy 
would cost the yearly stipend of a curate. A 
few verses, chapters, or sometimes one or 
more of the epistles, were translated, and 
were sparsely circulated. They were pos- 
sessed by but few; and but a very small num- 

213 



214 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

ber of persons in the whole world knew of the 
existence of any other Scriptures than these. 

Luther, at the age of twenty, had never 
seen or heard of a Bible. His discovery of it 
finally was the result of mere curiosity. In 
examining the title-pages of old volumes in 
the library at Erfurth, he lighted upon the 
sacred manuscript for the first time; and 
from this circumstance we may conclude that 
at that time, and for all great practical ends, 
the Bible had become wholly lost to the world. 
It was buried in a dead language, in caverns 
in the interior of Asia, in the solitary cells of 
convents, or on the remote shelves of public 
institutions. Most of those who had access to 
it could not read it; and hence God's chosen 
instrumentality, made indispensable to man's 
salvation, had been taken away, and the 
blessed day-spring was hid from human eyes. 

But the Scriptures might have been restored, 
— might have been given to the people, — had 
not the whole world's nominal Christianity re- 
sisted the attempt, — and that in all places and 
for ages. When the nations were angry and 
closed the blessed book by violence, it indeed 
required an angel's mighty hand to open and 
to restore it. 

In a.d. 1229 the translations of the Albi- 



THE ART OF PRINTING. 215 

erenses were condemned and cast into the 

> 

flames. These afflicted disciples sought to 
repair their infinite loss by committing the 
Scriptures to memory; and among the inhabit- 
ants of the valleys this became common. So- 
cieties among the young were formed for 
this purpose, and to each member was in- 
trusted a portion of the word of God, which 
it was required of him to commit and recite 
perfectly. 

A candidate for the ministry in those times 
was not sufficiently qualified to preach the 
gospel while as yet he remained unable to 
recite all the books of both Testaments from 
memory. The monks, the doctors of the Sor- 
bonne, St. Bernard, and Eeinerius the Inqui- 
sitor, take special notice of the astonishing 
familiarity of the Albigeois with the Scrip- 
tures, and attribute their vast superiority in 
debate to this cause. 

Wicliffe's translation, made one hundred 
years before the art of printing was dis- 
covered, was violently suppressed. Any per- 
son who possessed any portion of WiclifTe's 
English version was condemned to the stake; 
and many suffered martyrdom for no other 
reason. And, though the true church sur- 
vived in England and in many other places, 



216 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

yet she barely survived. In the twelfth cen- 
tury Innocent III., by the tortures of the In- 
quisition and by vast and merciless armies, 
had well-nigh destroyed the last remnant of 
God's elect ; and, but for the wars of the cross 
in Asia at the time, the fearful consummation 
might have been reached. 

No loss to the church was ever so calamitous 
as the loss of the Bible. When the Greek lan- 
guage was generally spoken, the divine with- 
drawal of inspired teachers was accompanied 
with the substitution of the inspired word, 
which occupied their places and afforded to 
all its sufficient supply of saving light;, but 
when that language ceased to be spoken the 
church perished over whole countries. She 
lost the Word, and with it expired her vi- 
tality. No course, then, when the object was 
her total extinction, could have been pursued 
that promised to be more fatally successful 
than to deprive her of her Bible. It was a 
policy well understood by her enemies, and 
for three hundred years most rigorously 
carried out. 

From the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, 
but here and there a copy escaped, either in 
England or on the continent, the espionage of 
those in the interests or in the pay of, Rome. 



THE ART OF PRINTING. 217 

Not only the great centres of the world's 
gathered life, but rural districts, mountain- 
gorges, and remote villages, were alike under 
the argus gaze of the ever-watchful Antichrist. 
And when the least indications of reviving 
piety became visible, and the precious volume 
began to distribute its healing leaves, the In- 
quisitor was at once abroad, and the dungeon 
and the stake proved but all too effective. 

The true church seemed to lose ultimately, 
in rivers of blood and in the despairing and 
secret flight of the remnant of her children, 
all that she had ever gained. The dead told 
no tales. Her very history vanished in the 
ilames that consumed her martyrs. It is now 
gathered mainly from the notes of Inquisitors. 
Rome in all these conflicts was ever triumphant, 
and ever pointed her monitory finger from the 
eternal hills to the dungeon, to the rack, to 
whole regions blackened by the flames she had 
kindled and strewed with the whitened bones 
of the godly, and cried to the scattered rem- 
nant, "Who comes this way, let him behold 
and fear to sin!" 

Such had ever been the result until the com- 
mencement of the sixteenth century. The 
church survived ; but it was amid the solitudes 
of deserts or in uninhabitable mountains. In 
19 o 



218 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

these wild coverts of the tiger and the wolf 
she sat in sackcloth, now singing her hymn 
of praise, now surprised by the Dragoon that 
hunted her life, and now bowing her head in 
her spirit's desolation. 

And, but for the discovery of the art of 
printing, the Reformation of the sixteenth 
century must have shared the fate of those 
that had preceded it. " Oh !" exclaimed 
Tyndale, "while I am sowing in one place 
they ravage the field I have just left. I can- 
not be everywhere. If Christians had the 
Scriptures in their own tongue, they could 
themselves withstand these sophists. With- 
out the Bible, it is impossible to establish the 
laity in the truth/' 

Twenty-two years after the martyrdom of 
Huss, while Rome was meditating a subjuga- 
tion of the Greek church to the sovereign pon- 
tiff, Laurentius Custos was engaged, in the 
neighbourhood of Harlem, in cutting his name 
in raised letters on the bark of a birch-tree. 
He amused himself by reproducing copies, at 
his pleasure, with these rude types, and finally 
began to print on a larger scale. While per- 
fecting his newly-discovered art, his servant 
(he relates) stole his types and tools and fled 
to Mentz. 



THE ART OF PRINTING. 219 

In the latter place, in A.D. 1442, a company 
of printers, aided by John Faustus, a wealthy 
citizen, began to print with wooden and after- 
ward with metallic types. It is said that the 
first book they printed was a Bible, and that 
they completed the task in eight years. The 
company kept their art a profound secret. 
They were mutually bound, under oath, not 
to reveal their great and lucrative discovery. 
But, in A.D. 1468, Mentz was stormed and 
sacked by Adolphus, Archbishop of Nassau, 
and, the printers having fled into different 
countries, each set up for himself a printing- 
establishment. The art ceased any longer 
to be a secret. In 1530, when Tyndale 
and Luther were issuing their Bibles, there 
were two hundred presses in operation in 
Europe. 

The first translation of the Scriptures into 
English, directly from the original, was made 
by William Tyndale : (that made by Wicliffe 
was translated from the Latin.) Tyndale 
rose in England simultaneously with Luther 
in Germany. Unable to proceed with his 
great work at home, he in 1524 visited 
Luther, and in less than two years succeeded 
in printing three thousand copies of his ver- 
sion. Shortly after numerous copies reached 



220 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

England, and were diligently though secretly 
circulated. 

Bishop Tonstall condemned " this most pes- 
tiferous and most pernicious poison of Tyn- 
dale," and prohibited its use. Many of the 
people were imprisoned and many of the 
books publicly burned. But the destruction 
of the copies in England encouraged the 
Dutch to resupply a market in which they 
were in such demand. Their sales were rapid 
and their profits enormous. Tonstall, to arrest 
the evil in its source, went to Antwerp and 
bought up all the copies he could obtain. 
These were all committed to the flames in St. 
Paul's churchyard by the zealous bishop. He 
was not aware that printing was such a pro- 
lific source of reproduction, and was amazed 
that the Dutch had another edition, shortly 
after, ready for the English market, desiring 
to sell the books, not caring whether they were 
read or burned. 

Archbishop Warham also assembled a con- 
vention, (a.d. 1530,) and sought to close the 
open book. The good people were called upon 
" to detest and abhor the New Testament 
printed in English," and to deliver up all the 
copies in their possession to the proper authori- 
ties. Ah me! how many in that day gave 



TIIE ART OF PRINTING. 221 

liberty and life itself away in their zeal for the 
diffusion of the Holy Scriptures ! " To see," 
says Fox, "their travails, their earnest seek- 
ing, their burning zeal, their readings, their 
watchings, their secret assemblies, their love 
and concord, their godly living, their faithful 
marrying with the faithful, may make us now, 
in these our days of free profession, to blush 
for shame." 

Tyndale's Bible survived the martyr. He, 
while prosecuting with ardour his great work, 
was arrested at Antwerp and strangled for the 
crime of heresy. His last prayer was for his 
country, and especially that the Lord would 
open the eyes of the king of England. In that 
same year Henry gave the Bible to the people. 

19* 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

THE ART OF PRINTING AND THE REFORMATION. 

" Howl, winds of night! your force combine : 
Without His high behest 
Ye shall not, in the mountain-pine, 
Disturb the sparrow's nest." 

Kirke White. 

We now turn to Germany, not for the pur- 
pose of following up the thrilling history of 
Luther, not to survey the colossal proportions 
of his massive intellect, not to observe his 
courage amid perils, his hairbreadth escapes, 
his triumphs over Dr. Eck, Cardinal Cajetan, 
and the learned Erasmus, but to look in upon 
him in his prison at the Wartburg, in which, 
because he has nothing now to excite and em- 
ploy his active mind and to turn him off from 
his great work, he finishes the translation of 
the New Testament into the German. 

This, to use his own sententious words, was 
to bring forth "the sun whence all teachers 
receive their light." This, the greatest and 
most effective of all the works of the illus- 



THE ART OF PRINTING. SIS 

trious Reformer, was finished in the summer 
of 1521. Before Tyndale and Luther knew 
each other, the same blessed Spirit had em- 
ployed them both, in different countries and 
in different languages, in the consummation 
of the same difficult and momentous task. 
Shortly after, they met at Antwerp, and their 
versions were issued very nearly at the same 
time. 

But for this, — but for the numerous copies 
of the living word put in circulation by the Re- 
formers, — like Waldo, WiclifFe, and Huss, they 
also and their works would have perished 
with their own living age. But, when the 
Scriptures in the vulgar tongue became the 
basis of the Reformation, the Reformation it- 
self, despite an occasional winter, became pe- 
rennial as the verdure which returning spring 
ever renews and freshens on the martyr's 
grave. 

The book thus opened in Germany led the 
alarmed enemies of reform to insist renewedly 
and peremptorily on the execution of the sen- 
tence against Luther and his Bible. " I say," 
said the Papal legate to the Diet at Nurem- 
berg, " on this point as I do of the rest. The 
sentences of the pope and the emperor ought 
to be implicitly obeyed; the books should be 



224 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

burned, and the printers and vendors of them 
duly punished. There is no other way to 
suppress and extinguish this pernicious sect. 
It is from the reading of their books that all 
these evils have arisen."* " The flames of 
their treason," says Pallavicini, a are not to 
be extinguished by concessions, but quenched 
by showers of blood. "f 

George, Duke of Saxony, armed with In- 
quisitorial and Papal authority, sought to 
carry out these cruel policies, and for this pur- 
pose purchased and destroyed all the copies 
of the Testament in German he could obtain, 
severely punishing at the same time those of 
his subjects who refused to deliver them up. 
His kingdom resounded with anathemas against 
the Eeformers, falling in bitterness from priestly 
lips, and with the uproar of persecution. 

But the press astonished and confounded the 
foes of truth. It restored the lost copies of 
the inspired word, and oppression roused an 
interest that gentleness would have left dor- 
mant. The Bible was sought out and read 
among all classes with unprecedented avidity, 
and what the living teacher, without it, was 
unable to do, the word did for him : — It in ten 

* Millner, chap. xvi. f Ibid. 



TIIE ART OF PRINTING. 225 

thousand dwellings became a burning and an 
inextinguishable light, whether that teacher 
were abroad or whether he slept in the 
prison or the grave. " It is not I, I repeat 
it, it is the divine word, which has done every 
thing."* 

In the days of the apostles, the inspiration 
of numerous teachers gave the church her 
vantage-ground. Her ministry was a living 
word, — an epistle read of all. But when un- 
inspired men succeeded to them, and the book 
which they left behind became itself sealed 
up in the silence and darkness of a dead lan- 
guage, the teachers which appealed to it as 
umpire in every debated point openly admitted 
their own liability to err, and sunk at once out 
of sight as ultimate authority whenever that 
book was referred to. Not so the Papal eccle- 
siastic. He claimed infallibility for his church, 
and for himself, as the authorized and ultimate 
interpreter of its faith. 

The Protestant, following the impulses of a 
better age, exalted against the infallibility of 
the church the infallibility of the evangelists, 
and against the infallibility of the priest the 
infallibility of the Holy Spirit. The rage of 

* Millner, ch. xvi, 



226 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH, 

Rome, therefore, at this time fell most severely 
upon the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue, and 
on what was termed by them " private inter- 
pretation." The issue was in reality between 
the open Bible in the angel's hand and Rome. 
And the conflict that now arose became one of 
new, peculiar, and of overmastering difficulty. 

Before the art of printing was discovered, 
the dungeon and the fagot in a few short 
years laid the rising Reformation low; now 
the living teacher might perish from among 
men, but Bibles and Testaments fell like the 
dew, silently and secretly, in multiplied edi- 
tions and copies, everywhere. They were on 
the departed Inquisitor's track while yet it was 
warm ; or, while he snatched the copy from the 
shelf of the peasant and cast it into the fire, 
its fellow slept securely under the hearth- 
stone. When the living teacher fell, his elo- 
quent appeals were cut short forever. The 
mighty champion had but one life, and one 
blow ended it. But, when he added the press 
to the pulpit, he reproduced himself in ten 
thousand lives; depositing these in the safe- 
keeping of numerous individuals, families, and 
kingdoms. 

We may well smile in this day at the Pope's 
bull against Bible societies. Will he spread 



THE ART OF PRINTING* 227 

his scarlet robe on the broad mountains and 
absorb all the dews of heaven in its tiny folds? 
Will he put up his little palm and expect to 
quench in it the light of day ? thou impo- 
tent and impious one ! " God shall destroy 
thee. He shall take thee away. He shall 
pluck thee out of thy dwelling-place and root 
thee out of the land of the living. The right- 
eous also shall see and shall fear and shall 
laugh at him. Lo, this is the man that made 
not God his strength, but strengthened himself 
in his wickedness." 

Papal infallibility resolves itself ultimately 
into the infallibility of every individual mem- 
ber of its priesthood. It was an after-thought, 
the result of a peculiar necessity. Perplexed 
individuals were required to go to them, and 
not to depend upon the guidance of their own 
erring minds. 

"The sacred writings," said Erasmus, "are an 
abyss in whose depths even the most learned 
men have often been lost The Scrip- 
tures are committed to the learned, and to 
them only." Such were the assumptions which 
were, in the new circumstances of the contend- 
ing parties, resorted to to close again the now 
open book. Since it could not be destroyed 
by fire, it might be by construction. If its in- 



228 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

terpretation must ever be derived from the 
priesthood, Home would, after all her fears, 
lose nothing by a translation. The Bible 
would be quite as effectually sealed in such 
an event as though it still had slept in the 
unbroken repose of an unknown tongue. 

It was, however, opened as an authoritative 
record in two respects. In the first it was 
opened in a translation ; in the second, to the 
understandings of men by the Holy Spirit. 
The author of the Bible should understand his 
own meaning best, and had promised illumina- 
tion to the sincere suppliant. "The sacred 
writings are not to be understood but by that 
Spirit with which they were written ; which 
Spirit is never felt to be more powerful and 
energetic than when he attends the serious 
perusal of the writings which he himself dic- 
tated."* 

The alternative presented thus by the Pro- 
testant was not that of a selection of a Papal 
or a Protestant for a guide. The latter aban- 
doned, at once and forever, the awful arena 
into which he had been challenged by his 
Papal antagonist, and elevated in his place 
the Holy Spirit, to take charge of the per- 

* Millner, vol. ii. p. 286. 



THE ART OF PRINTING. 229 

plexities of every mind, and to open the mean- 
ing of His own word to every humble and 
earnest inquirer after truth. 

" However blameless a life I might lead as a 
monk," said Luther, "I experienced a most 
unquiet conscience. I perceived myself a sin- 
ner before God. I saw that I could do nothing 
to appease him, and I hated the idea of a just 
God that punished sinners. I was well versed 
in all St. Paul's writings, and, in particular, I 
had a most wonderful desire to understand the 
Epistle to the Eomans. But I was puzzled 
with the expression, 'Therein is the right- 
eousness of God revealed.' My heart rose 
almost against God with a silent sort of blas- 
phemy Over and over I turned the 

above-mentioned passage to the Eomans most 
importunately. My thirst to know the apostle's 
meaning was insatiable. 

"At length, while I was meditating day and 
night on the words and their connection with 
what immediately follows, — namely, ' The 
just shall live by faith,' — it pleased God to 
have pity upon me, to open my eyes and to 
show me that ( the righteousness of God/ 
which is here said in the gospel to be revealed 
from faith to faith, relates to the method by 
which God in his mercy justifies a sinner 



230 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

through faith Hence I felt myself a 

new man, and all the Scriptures appeared to 

have a new face This very passage 

of St. Paul proved to me the entrance into 
paradise."* 

The Waldenses, the Wicliffites, the Hussites, 
the Lutherans, the Calvinists, the true church 
in every age, from the earliest times, obtained 
her light from above, and sought not an in- 
fallible but a converted ministry, whose un- 
derstandings Jesus had opened that they 
should understand the Scriptures. In deter- 
mining whether teachers were true or false, 
how did the church " sift their private spirit, 
whether they had experienced any internal 
distress of soul, the attacks of death and hell, 
and the comforts of the new birth unto right- 
eousness" ! " If," runs the instructions, " you 
hear nothing from them but smooth, tranquil, 
and, forsooth, what they call devout, religious 
contemplations, regard them not."f 

The opening of the Scriptures in a transla- 
tion made them accessible to the people. But 
they saw not to the end of that which was 
abolished. The same veil that blinded the 
Jew obscured the vision of the Gentile. He 

* Millner, vol. ii. p. 232. f Ibid. p. 342. 



THE ART OF PRINTING. 231 

too stood before the burning mount, and, 
though he had heard of Jesus, yet to him 
also, until divinely enlightened, his Lord re- 
mained entombed underneath the ministration 
of death. 

The Reformation of the sixteenth century 
was a revival of spiritual life in the kingdoms 
of the West. This was the mainspring of its 
power; and by it the translated Scriptures be- 
came a lamp to the feet and a light to the path 
of lost nations. Omit this most essential part 
of the vision, and God's great work is effectu- 
ally hid from our eyes. 

The well-known symbol of a Papal church 
is a cross. It is the universal sign of her faith, 
whether made by the printer, the goldsmith 
or carpenter, whether stamped on a book, or 
worn on the breast, or elevated on the tops of 
churches. But it is not a more universal badge 
of Romanism than is an open Bible that of 
Protestantism. 

The Bible was never opened to any con- 
siderable extent, as we have seen, until it 
assumed the form of a printed book. And, as 
the effort to close it again and the effort to 
keep it open has made it the centre of debate 
among civilized nations for three centuries, it 
has become, providentially, the well-known 



232 ISIIMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

sign of the Protestant religion. The printer, 
the carpenter, and the gilder, are alike em- 
ployed to supply the recognised symbol of a 
Protestant Christianity by those who would 
represent a Reformer or a modern clergyman, 
or characterize a book by a sign on its cover, 
or a Bible society by a sign at its door. 

From the time in which in England the 
Bible was fastened to a desk in the centre of 
a library for public use, because the demand 
exceeded the supply, until this day, when it is 
offered gratuitously to all, it has ever been the 
striking and significant emblem of our Pro- 
testant faith. And while Rome continues to 
elevate her cross and to condemn the Bible to 
the flames, so long will the picture of an open 
book in the hand of an angel, or in the hand 
of a martyr or a minister, distinguish the 
friends of the Bible from its foes and point 
them out as the irreconcilable enemies of 
darkness and of Rome. 

And who can fail to see, in that halo round 
about the head of the cloud-robed angel* of 
the Reformation, the token of mercy? It is 
here at this point in earth's sad history, — on 
this Ararat where the ark finally rested, — 

* Revelation x. 1 . 



THE ART OF PRINTING. 233 

that we look out on plats of living verdure 
which here and there dot the desolate ex- 
panse, and which are seen amid the remaining 
and angry surges of the receding flood. And 
while the mournful experience of the past 
fills us with anxiety for the future, the bow is 
seen in the cloud, and the face of the angel 
that holds the little book in his right hand 
shines through the tears of a tempest now 
passing away. And we assuredly gather, from 
that emblem, that that blessed book shall not be 
again closed, until the heavens themselves 
shall be rolled together as a scroll, and the 
earth with the things that are therein shall be 
burned up. 

20* P 



CHAPTER XXIX. 



REFORMATION. 

Thy foot hath left upon the sea 

A glimmering path to guide our flight; 

But where proud Home pursues our "way 
It turns the day-spring into night. 

The right foot of the angel of the great Re- 
formation was in the sea. His most auspicious 
outgoings were to be in connection with its 
turbulent waves. Thus is it intimated that a 
pillar of fire, to guide the church amid many 
dark and disastrous providences, should cast 
its light across the ocean and invite her perse- 
cuted children to seek an asylum on the shores 
of a distant continent. 

Two short years after the storming of Mentz 
and the consequent dispersion of its secret 
conclave of printers, the same Providence 
which had in this wonderful manner originated 
printing-presses simultaneously in the different 
countries of Europe brought to Lisbon the 

231 



AMERICA. 235 

son of a wool-comber, — a youth of most re- 
markable genius and invention, and who, ob- 
taining the command of vessels for the pur- 
pose, undertook the discovery of an unknown 
coast. 

In a.d. 1492, Columbus reached the West 
Indies, and shortly after the Western continent 
became known to Europe. Numerous adven- 
turers hastened to its shores in successive voy- 
ages and in a fruitless quest of wealth and do- 
minion. The mariner's compass and the art 
of ship-building and navigation, however, be- 
came by these means gradually perfected, and 
the great end of Providence, in its mighty foot- 
print in the sea, came in a few short years to 
be realized. 

Hitherto the emigration of nomadic tribes, 
the wanderings of the persecuted, or the travels 
of merchants, had been by land. A few islands 
clotting the Atlantic coast of Europe had been 
reached; the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and 
the British Channel, and a few other inland 
basins, had been coasted and crossed; but these 
were short voyages, made long before by the 
Egyptians, the Phenicians, the Babylonians, 
the Greeks, and the Romans, and their repe- 
tition could make no new or considerable im- 
pressions on the fortunes of the race, — could 



236 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

not be referred to as forming a grand epoch in 
the world's eventful history, and be consist- 
ently represented by the descent of an angel 
from heaven throwing with his right foot, and 
for the first time since the days of John, a 
luminous track across the sea. 

But when America was discovered, — when 
the Western continent opened its bosom to the 
refugees from the Old World and threw a wide 
ocean between them and their oppressors, — this 
became a great event, and must in all time be 
chronicled as such. There originated then, 
on that far-off and protected coast, a mighty 
nationality under the sway of the little book 
in the angers hand. Thousands, finding that 
they could not enjoy its chartered rights and 
walk by its laws of salvation under the frown- 
ing battlements of Rome, to escape the stake 
and win their freedom lied to the sea, to join 
the new commonwealth opening its gates to- 
ward the setting of the sun. 

It was in this manner that its most desirable 
acquisitions were made. Persecution in the 
Old World drove successive companies of weep- 
ing disciples into the sea to form and to defend 
the Western states. It, more than all other 
causes put together, originated the great Re- 
public. 



AMERICA. 237 

The ashes of Huss found their way to the 
sea. Those of Wicliffe were thrown into the 
Swift. "It," says Fuller, "conveyed them 
into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the 
narrow seas, they into the main ocean; and 
thus the ashes of Wicliffe are the emblem of 
his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the 
world over." 

Into that sea, which shall yet yield up its 
tears and its dead, the angel placed his foot. 
There were the outgoings of his most illus- 
trious providences; there was the bow of pro- 
mise round about his head; and, though painted 
on a nebula of tears, it assured the pilgrim that 
the storm had passed away. 

The early settlements of interested adven- 
turers in the New World, in pursuit of gold 
and gems, ended in disappointment and dis- 
aster. The ruins of colonial villages, and the 
bones that were strewed upon the clearings of 
the wilderness, startled and discouraged those 
that succeeded such unfortunate pioneers. 
They looked in terror upon the ashes of their 
huts and the trail of blood where the plough 
stood in the half-finished furrow of the corn- 
field, and turned away in despair. 

But, when the persecuted fled successively 
to the sea on a religious account, the settle- 



238 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

ments became permanent, and grew ultimately 
into flourishing states. Their ships were pi- 
loted by an unseen intelligence, and landed 
their precious freights at the most desirable 
points. Toward them the angel ever turned 
his bright face and the bright side of the efful- 
gent pillar. 

Their favoured emigrations stand ever in 
striking contrast with those of a pursuing 
Home. From her unblessed and sinister track 
the face of the angel was ever averted ; and 
the dark side of the fiery pillar cast a cheer- 
less shadow over her missions and fortunes. 

Every step with her has proved a mistake. 
Her earlier and most numerous converts in the 
New World were its aborigines, — a fated race, 
that have already descended into the tomb 
opened for them by the hand of a higher and 
a holier civilization. 

Her conquests also in South America and 
the West Indies are now within the eddies of 
a mightier and a more absorbing attraction ; 
and her immigrant millions, scattered through 
the North, surrounded by the nobler manhood 
and superior intelligence of Protestant com- 
munities, have failed to close the little book in 
the angel's hand, or even to preserve them- 
selves from its mysterious sway. 



AMKKK'A. 239 

Hers is a failing struggle. And it is ob- 

O CO 

viously the destiny of * the swaggering and 
wrinkled harlot to waste away and perish 
amid institutions and influences whose powers 
of assimilation are steady, expansive, and irre- 
sistible. While in Europe, during the same 
period, she has won back most of her lost ter- 
ritory and power, in America she mourns the 
loss of most of her treasures and her children. 
The future of this goodly land is also full 
of hopeful intimations. The nature and ne- 
cessary tendency of the mighty causes which 
now already exist seem destined to make the 
new continent the perpetual home of a vast 
and a happy Protestant nationality. The de- 
lightful experience of the past, and the bow 
of promise encircling the angel's brow with its 
halo of attractive benignity, assure us that 
those pilgrims who fled to the sea took the 
propitious track, reached the summit of safety 
where the ark rested, and from the tops of 
their Alleghanies we look back over perilous 
and assuaged deeps, and recount on the historic 
page the devastations of a deluge whose angry 
surges can never reach us more. 



CHAPTER XXX. 

ISLAMISM AND THE REFORMATION. 

" The ocean eagle soar'd 
From bis nest by the white waves' foam, 
And the rocking pines of the forest roar'd : 
This was their welcome home !" 

We how turn from the sea, — that strik- 
ing emblem of the church, of her unsettled 
and changeful state, of her stormy doom, 
of the crude and troubled elements out of 
which she was to construct for herself her 
home in the New World, — to the land where 
society still continued to repose in the midst 
of media3val dynasties, and, as the normal 
law of its safety, undesirous and resistful of 
change. 

Well might the angel place his left foot on 
a spot so unpropitious, where improvement 
would be sure to be opposed, and new though 
right opinions be made treason against princes 
and impiety in the church. 

In the New World the church found all 

240 



EUROPE. 241 

social circumstances appropriate or controllable, 
and ultimately congenial. She had but to rise 
there upon the broad and sufficient foundation 
of her open book and her blessed testimony. 
She had no one there to spy out her liberty, 
or embarrass or retard the natural outwork- 
ings of her inward life. 

But, in the Old, both church and state fell 
back on the iron forms of past mistakes; and 
long-cherished errors, hallowed by time and 
endorsed by custom, yielded slowly, reluct- 
antly, and often but partially, to the progress 
of the Reformation. Yea, many of the Re- 
formers needed themselves to be reformed, — 
needed all the treason, cruelty, and persecution 
that pursued them to prevent their fatal con- 
cessions to Rome, or, perhaps, their return to 
her bosom. 

Leo's bull, and the harsh treatment received 
by Luther at Worms, proved a blessing. It 
insulted his generous though impulsive na- 
ture, and awakened an opposition which a 
more gentle course might have modified or 
neutralized. And yet, with all that tended 
to isolate and freely develop the church, Ge- 
neva, the British Islands, and Holland, became 
finally the prominent centres of a reformation 

that had halted sadly in other places. 
21 



242 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

Luther could scarcely ever be himself. 
Erasmus, at the first, preached to him mo- 
deration. Melancthon also, and the Protest- 
ant princes, were ever ready to instruct his 
caution and to restrain the free outworkings 
of his evangelical spirit. "With a nature so im- 
pressible and social, and ever listening to the 
counsels of the worldly-wise or the spiritually 
timid, it is truly wonderful that he at length 
broke through so many restraints and put so 
wide a separation between himself and Home. 

Zuingle, Calvin, and Knox, were farther 
from the focus of such influences; and the 
church under their auspices became more 
thoroughly reformed, rose to a purer evangel- 
ism. But in no country did she rise as she 
did when the ocean rolled between her and 
the Old World. 

The struggles of the non-conformists and the 
recent exodus of the Free Church of Scotland 
are examples which show the tendency of the 
church toward a more scriptural form and a 
freer ecclesiasticism than she had ever attained 
under her transatlantic surroundings. 

The Protestantism of Germany also, unlike 
that of the United States, trembled often on 
the very verge of ruin, and gained at last for 
herself a precarious footing, not by a natural 



EUROPE. 243 

development of her own principles and power, 
but by a wonderful intervention,* temporary 
in its influence, whose aid was an indirection 
of Providence, and which, having subserved 
its purpose, would pass away. 

Thus, in A. d. 1530, while yet in its infancy, 
it was well-nigh strangled in its cradle. Papal 
and imperial foes, having united, had taken 
the initiatory steps for its destruction. The 
princes, states, and cities which had thrown 
off the papal yoke were required instantly to 
return to their duty and to their allegiance to 
the sovereign pontiff, on pain of imperial and 
papal displeasure. And, but for the sudden 
appearance of Solyman in great force thun- 
dering at the gates of the empire, the Protest- 
ant cause, in Germany at least, must have 
been ruined. It had been resolved that " the 
flames of its treason could not be extinguished 
by concessions : it could be quenched only by 
showers of blood." 

In the United States it sprang up peacefully, 
as plants spring up under genial skies. In 
Germany it survived an impending ruin only 
amid the terrors of invasion and the storms of 
war. 

* Invasions by the Turks. 



244 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

Mosheim, in accounting for the establish- 
ment of Protestantism, shows it to have been 
the result of a temporary necessity, a com- 
promise for the present, that left it on a very 
insecure basis : — "With respect to the emperor, 
various reasons united to turn his views to- 
ward peace. For, on the one hand, he stood 
in need of succours against the Turks, which 
the Protestant princes refused to grant while 
the edicts of Worms and Augsburg remained 
in force ; . . . . and, after various negotiations, 
a treaty of peace w T as concluded at Nuremberg, 
a.d. 1532, between the emperor and the Protest- 
ant princes, on the following conditions : — That 
the latter should furnish a subsidy for carrying 
on the war against the Turks, and acknowledge 
Ferdinand as lawful king of the Romans,"* &c. 
Thus, the suspension of hostilities was the re- 
sult of a stern necessity, — the brief and un- 
certain lull of the volcano whose convulsions 
might soon become still more terrible. 

In a.d. 1542, the emperor renewedly disco- 
vered his hostile intentions by turning against 
the Elector of Cologne, and by summoning him 
to answer the charges to be preferred against 
him. In the mean time, in the Low Countries, 

* Mosheim, vol. ii. p. 34. 



EUROPE. 245 

his Protestant subjects were persecuted with 
unrelenting severity. At Worms lie silenced 
the Protestant ministers; and, that he might 
be unembarrassed by the Turks in his efforts 
at this time to destroy the church, he sent 
overtures of peace to Constantinople. 

The Council of Trent, summoned for the 
same sinister purpose, assembled, and com- 
menced its deliberations, — a sanhedrim of 
bigoted and fierce ecclesiastics, who were 
again to deliver Jesus to Pilate to be cruci- 
fied. A solemn protestation against a council, 
called solely by the Papal authorities and 
under their immediate control, was without 
effect. Its sessions began in a.d. 1546, and were 
in secret; but enough transpired at the time to 
make it patent to all that the church of the 
book was to be destroyed, and that on a sud- 
den a blow was to be struck that should at once 
annihilate the Protestant interest. Charles, 
that he might be ready to enforce its expected 
decrees, hastened his military preparations. 

The death of Luther just at this juncture — 
an event which was regarded in all Papal 
circles as a most propitious coincident — aug- 
mented the gloom that hung in increasing 
darkness over the Protestant cause. 

A decisive battle, fought on the Elbe, April 

21* 



246 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

24, a.d. 1547, completed the catastrophe. The 
unhappy confederates fell before a tact and a 
generalship to which they were not equal, and 
were placed completely at the mercy of a foe 
bent on their extermination. Eesist they could 
not. Their armies were subdued and their 
leaders dispersed or in captivity. Supplica- 
tion without retraction would be vain. It 
would fall on the ear of the deaf adder. Flight 
was impossible, and whichever way they looked 
it was " a red, red sea from shore to shore." 

And now, at this fearful crisis, it is that 
there occurs another of those wonderful in- 
terventions to which the church had so often 
been indebted for her safety. An army of a 
hundred thousand Turks, already victorious 
in battle, are wrenching from Ferdinand his 
Hungarian crown, and their powerful fleet 
hovers menacingly on the unprotected coasts of 
Sicily and Naples. Even Maurice betrays his 
trust and suddenly heads the Protestant con- 
federacy. The astonished Charles flies to 
Passau, and the Council of Trent disperse in 
dismay. The distress of the Papal party forced 
a capitulation. 

The Protestants, armed simply in self-defence, 
and seeking only for religious toleration, were 
ready to listen to terms, and, to save the emi- 



EUROPE. 247 

sion of fraternal blood, agreed to march against 
Solyman, if on that condition Protestantism 
could be permanently established and its open 
book and holy ministry freed from further mo- 
lestation. Ferdinand seized eagerly this pro- 
position, influenced the chafed and defeated 
Charles to sign the treaty, and the pacification 
of Passau was consummated : — a religious peace, 
to which Borne was driven under terror of the 
Turkish sword. 

But toward the Protestant cause it was a 
bare and a reluctant suspension of direct hos- 
tilities. And the struggles by which it reached 
this precarious security belonged to the sinis- 
ter locality on which was placed the left foot 
of the angel, and which were wholly unknown 
to the happier experience of the church in the 
New World. In it, no longer trammelled by 
state control or old or wrong opinions, she 
gained no stinted growth underneath the over- 
shadowing walls of a venerable Establishment; 
nor is her very being, like that of her trans- 
atlantic sister at the present time, threatened 
by the encroachments of Kome. 

While Germany thus warred, and gained 
her bare permit to live in the heart of an 
enemy's country, England became the scene 
of remarkable changes, which, while they fa- 



248 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

voured the existence and growth of the church, 
surrounded her nevertheless at the same time 
with many uncongenial influences not felt 
beyond the Atlantic. 

Henry VIIL, quite as imperious as the 
sovereign pontiff whose ecclesiastical supre- 
macy and benefices he appropriated, became a 
Protestant, not from conviction, but from cir- 
cumstances. Had the fear of offending Charles 
not been in the ascendant in Italian circles, the 
desired divorce of Catharine would have been 
sanctioned, and Henry would have remained 
the fast friend of the Papacy. He cast off its 
jurisdiction, indeed, but retained its spirit, and 
sought to transfer to himself a papal supremacy 
over Great Britain : — to fix the star that fell 
from the papal tiara into the Northern Sea in 
his own crown. 

Ignorant of the true nature of that kingdom 
which is not of this world, it seems to have 
occurred to him as most reasonable that the 
crown of that spiritual lordship now lost to 
his Holiness should grace the brow of some 
other than that of Messias alone. Investing 
himself, therefore, with a ghostly rule, he exer- 
cised to a considerable extent an arbitrary 
spiritual domination. Cranmer's superior in- 
telligence modified indeed his usurpations; but 



EUROPE. 249 

his influence over the church was untoward 
and his reign oppressive. 

Mary's ultimate accession restored Popery 
again, and that, also, with an easy transition. 
The poor Protestants were renewedly treated 
with extreme rigour. England's gentler nature 
recoiled in horror at witnessing tortures, unpre- 
cedented for their cruelty, inflicted on men the 
most venerable and the most virtuous in her 
realms. 

The accession of Elizabeth re-established the 
Protestant faith. But it was a Protestantism 
which, while it rejected in part the Catholic, 
rejected also in part the Protestant, opinions ; 
putting itself in opposition, in many respects, 
to both, and laving the foundation for those 

7 I/O 

animosities and persecutions which reveal to 
our calm retrospection the imprint on English 
soil of the left foot of the angel. 

Elizabeth loved a spiritual supremacy, — in- 
stituted her Court of High Commissions, which 
has not unjustly been called "the British Inqui- 
sition," — issued the "Act of Uniformity," — de- 
nied that the Scriptures were the only rule of 
faith and practice ; and, claiming that the fathers 
of the church in the first four centuries furnished 
an improved and a matured ecclesiasticism not 
found in the Scriptures alone, demanded that 
Q 



250 ISIDIAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

all her subjects should conform to her esta- 
blishment. Non-conformists were oppressed. 
Many of them, after leaving their country and 
-wandering into Holland, embarked finally for 
America, taking the track opened for them in 
the paths of the sea. 

In Switzerland, Protestantism won her tole- 
ration by the valour of her sons. Her troubled 
life, perpetuated amid the factions of Geneva 
and the subtlety of Jesuitism, has, however, 
finally met the fate that seems impending 
over all her sister-confederacies in Europe. 

Scotland, nourished at the fountains of 
Geneva and roused by the wild eloquence of 
Knox, embraced a Christianity which acknow- 
ledged no rule of faith and practice save the 
one fairly and sufficiently derived from the 
open book in the angel's hand. But, neverthe- 
less, after the struggle of centuries, with the 
strong fetters of the Establishment upon her 
vigorous limbs, she has at length also been 
driven into her exodus, and in that solemn 
event has fully asserted the superior excel- 
lence of her American and her model Presby- 
terianism. 

In France, the contest for religious toleration 
was long, vigorous, often most promising, but 
finally disastrous. In the very era in which 



EUROPE. 251 

Islamism experienced the greatest defeats and 
the crescent waned permanently before the 
cross, — in which, indeed, the Turks met with 
those irreparable reverses from which they 
have never since recovered, — the revocation 
of the Edict of Nantes occurred, A.D. 1685. 

This ruined in that kingdom the Protestant 
cause, filled Geneva, the mountain-gorges of 
the Alps, Holland, England, and America, with 
French refugees. A million fled during the 
extreme rigour of that long-continued persecu- 
tion that knew no mercy, and a hundred 
thousand perished in dungeons, at the stake, 
or by the sword. 

The drain upon France became a great poli- 
tical event. It gave creation to Holland : to 
it, and to England also, it gave the balance of 
power, and likewise furnished the American 
colonies — on the North River and in other 
places — with many of their most valuable ac- 
quisitions. New York became a Huguenot 
island; and her prestige and her wonderful 
prosperity is still welling up from these secret 
fountains. 

Providence, too, has his reprisals, and 
avenged his servants in that "plat" in which 
they suffered. The bloody scenes of the sub- 
sequent revolution might well be expected to 



252 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

follow such an exhaustion of national purity 
and conservatism. The councils of cruel Rome 
had well-nigh ruined France, — had sent a 
cancer on her cheek and a wolf into her 
breast, — had first shed her best blood and ex- 
patriated her best citizens, — and then had left 
her to the tender mercies of men educated, by 
the example of their persecuting sires, in the 
school of a most brutal violence. 

These, in the next age, became in their turn 
the ministers of avenging Heaven, in whose 
bosoms there was no pity and in whose cruel- 
ties no relentings. By them were the fearful 
butcheries of the Revolution enacted : — a wan- 
ton waste of life more terrible than any ever 
known in any example of former times; a 
" reign of terror" that could exist only in the 
lawlessness of such a generation. 

And now, after a long interval, on a review 
of such scenes of horror, and on following the 
refugees to their respective retreats in the Old 
and in the New World, it is not difficult to de- 
termine whether those who fled to Geneva, to 
Holland, to England, or those that crossed the 
ocean, took the most desirable path. Geneva 
has passed substantially into the hands of the 
Catholics. Holland is losing her Protestant- 
ism by the plottings of her foes and by the 



EURorE. 253 

emigration of her children to the New World; 
and what will be the destiny of England before 
ten years shall have passed away, time will 
show. Developments thus far, in any event, 
award the wisdom of a happier selection to 
those who followed the angel's track across 
the sea. 

Staten Island, the beautiful vallevs of the 
Hudson and the Mohawk, the James River in 
Virginia, and the Trent, in North Carolina, 
became in an early day the secure retreat of 
thousands. The number, wealth, and pros- 
perity of these settlements, in contrast with 
the disfranchisements, increasing poverty, and 
failing struggles of those left behind in the Old 
World, are of themselves a demonstration of the 
correctness of the view now taken, even though 
that view were not endorsed by the vision of 
John. 

22 



CHAPTER XXXI. 

ISLAMISM AND THE REFORMATION. CONTINUED. 



Across the land the crescent flew, 

It flew across the sea ; 
It shook the Papal turrets hoar ; 

It shook the West for thee. 



How wonderfully also were the fortunes of 
the church, amid all the foregoing strifes and 
changes, influenced by Ishmael! The fall of 
Constantinople led to the revival of letters and 
to the study of the languages in which the 
Scriptures were originally written: a most 
material auxiliary to the opening of the book 
in the angel's hand. The subsequent wars and 
invasions of the Turks led finally to the sale 
of indulgences under the pontificate of Leo X. 
It was the method suggested by the unscru- 
pulous pontiff, and relied upon by him to raise 
the means of conducting a crusade against the 
Moslem infidel. 

" In fact," said Luther, " the war with the 
Turks was the war of the Pope. It was an 

254 



THE OTTOMANS. 255 

offensive war, and a war founded on no good 
principle. It was made a pretext for exhaust- 
ing Germany of its money by the sale of indul- 
gences." But for this, then, the controversy 
between Luther and Tetzel would not have 
occurred. It was one of the indispensable links 
in the chain of causes which led on to the great 
Reformation. 

Indeed, the rise, progress, and best suc- 
cesses of that reformation synchronize with 
the rising and progressing fortunes of the 
Ottomans in Europe. When their empire 
culminates and begins to decline, Catholicism 
begins to repair her losses and to rise again 
to power. Seventeen years after Eugene's 
great victory over failing Turkey, a.d. 1699, 
the Order of the Jesuits is revived, and their 
withering councils secretly influence the cabi- 
nets of princes, and proscribed and manacled 
Protestantism steadily loses, one by one, her 
territorial acquisitions, and commences to be 
beaten back from the foot of the Alps to the 
British Channel. 

And, if the decline of Protestantism and the 
recovery of the Papacy shall continue to keep 
pace with the decline and the probably ap- 
proaching fall of Turkey in the future as it 
has in the past, its ultimate disappearance 



256 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

from Europe is quite inevitable ; and Rome — 
ambitious Rome — is yet destined to erect, on 
the ruins of Mien rivalries, a throne more 
magnificent and powerful than that which 
crowned the seven hills in the palmiest days 
of Hildebrand or Leo X. 

The incursions and the conquests of the 
Turks in Europe, from a.d. 1453 to a.d. 1697, — 
a period of two hundred and forty-four years, — 
were mighty, providential indirections, making 
Ishmael the blind yet effective umpire between 
the church and her powerful foes, calling off 
the persecutors just on the eve of their success, 
and that, from time to time, to attend to their 
own safety. 

During this period, — the period memorable in 
all time, because traversed by the events and 
consequences of the great Reformation, — Rome 
continued to be besieged in all her coasts. 
The iEgean Sea and the Mediterranean con- 
tinued to be swept by successive fleets, fitted out 
by the indefatigable Porte. Its armies followed 
each other perpetually, and successively also, 
into Austria, Hungary, and Transylvania. 
The tw r o last-named regions were brought under 
Ottoman rule, and retained for one hundred 
and seventy years in defiance of the Western 
powers. Indeed, the warlike character of the 



THE OTTOMANS. 257 

Turks at this time, the boldness and military 
skill of their leaders, their frequent enterprises 
of war and bloody victories, exhausted the 
empire, and were its perpetual terror and 
scourge.* 

Having, however, at the end of this period, 
fulfilled its mission, — having concentrated and 
exhausted hostilities on itself that would other- 
wise have expended their fury in the extermi- 
nation of the church, — and having afforded the 
church her providential opportunity of flight 
across the sea, — its power was broken. Prince 
Eugene, in a.d. 1697, gained over it a victory 
from which it never recovered. It lost pro- 
vinces, kingdoms, and the power of recupera- 
tion, in that defeat. The peace concluded in a.d. 
1699 gave back to the empire Transylvania, 
Hungary, Asaph, the Ukraine, and Podolia, — 
the entire peninsula of the Morea to the Isthmus 
of Corinth, including Dalmatia. 

From this epoch, the steady decline of the 
Ottoman strength and prowess is marked; and 
it continues to the present hour to give out 
still the tokens of a deep and fatal decay in 

* Mosheim's Eccl. History, Sixteenth Century, and Mil- 
nor's, covering the same period; Robertson's Charles V., 
from book iii. to x. inclusive. 
22* 



258 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

all those respects in which it had been formid- 
able and terrible before. 

The period selected for the great revival of 
religion was one marked by the skill, courage, 
and culture of the Eulers of the earth. Con- 
spicuous among these were Henry VIII., Francis 
I., Charles V., and Leo X. But, among these, 
Solyman the Great shone with a transcendent 
lustre. 

His accession to the throne in a.d. 1521 was 
at once the summit of its grandeur and the 
signal for the outbursting of Moslem propa- 
gandism anew in its aggressive wars. Bel- 
grade, deemed at that time the great barrier 
in the North against Turkish invasion, was 
invested by the sultan, and soon fell into his 
hands. Against Rhodes, the impregnable for- 
tress of the Archipelago, defended by the 
chivalry of eight Christian nations, and hither- 
to the terror of the Saracens, he persevered 
in a siege of five months, with a fleet of four 
hundred sail and an army of one hundred and 
forty thousand men. And, though at a loss of 
one hundred thousand of his troops, he con- 
tinued the contest until it was reduced to his 
sway. 

This earnest of his iron will and pledge of 
his future career was succeeded by the con- 



THE OTTOMANS. 259 

quest of the Crimea. Hungary shortly after 
delivered up the keys of her proud capital to 
the tierce Solyman. The bloody Caled had 
revived in his person ; and the right hand of 
Ishmael wanted not one to wield its scimitar. 
The whole country, as far as Raab, blackened 
by the flames of war, was encumbered and 
pestilential from the mangled remains of two 
hundred thousand inhabitants. 

In a.d. 1529 his victorious army sat down 
before the capital of Austria; and, though 
arrested at this point, and obliged to retreat 
on account of the fall rains, he reappeared in 
the spring, a.d. 1532, at the head of two hun- 
dred thousand men, against Charles V. He 
finally intrenched himself on the Danube, in 
which place he received and accepted the 
emperor's propositions of peace. Shortly after 
this he partially subdued the Venetian islands, 
and, recruiting his forces, prepared for new 
enterprises. 

In 1541 he again invaded Hungary; and 
numerous conflicts renewedly shook the trou- 
bled West, until Charles succeeded in negotia- 
ting another treaty of peace with his for- 
midable rival. This treaty, nevertheless, was 
speedily forgotten, and Transylvania was added 
to the dominions of the sultan. He died a.d. 



260 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

1566, while actively engaged in a war with 
Hungary. 

The following corresponding dates are worthy 
of special attention, since they furnish the suc- 
cinct evidence of providential intervention to 
save the church, while the Reformation was 
in progress, through the agency of Moslem 
armies. 

In A. d. 1521 Luther is condemned by the 
Diet at Worms, and by a ruse of his friends 
lies concealed at the Wartburg; and at the 
same time Solyman draws his terrific scimitar 
and threatens the West with eventual subjuga- 
tion. The empire is skirted with hostile iieets 
and armies, and many a fair province is laid 
waste with lire and sword. 

In a.d. 1524 Clement VIII. sent his legate to 
the Diet at Nuremberg, breathing threatenings 
and slaughter against the Reformation, and de- 
manding of the princes of the empire the 
execution of the decree of Worms against 
Luther. In the same year, and when his 
safety is in imminent peril, Solyman again 
entered Hungary in force, gained a signal vic- 
tory, received the keys of the conquered capi- 
tal, and put to death in the rural districts two 
hundred thousand citizens. 

The tranquillity enjoyed after the first Diet 



THE OTTOMANS. 261 

oi' Spire was Interrupted, Id a. p. L529, by a 
second 1 > i o t in the same place. In the same year 
the sultan appeared with a Mist army and com- 
menced the siege of Vienna. The persecutors, 
eager to ruin the Reformation, had to turn back, 
to repel the foe that hung in terror on their 
bleeding rear; and at this juncture it was 
that Luther, accuse J of indifference as to the 
Turkish invasion, wrote his celebrated letter in 
favour of the war against the Turks.* 

The severe decree against the Protestants 
issued by order of Charles, ever under the 
controlling influence of the Tope and his car- 
dinals, and which led the alarmed Protestants 
to assemble at Smalcald, A. P. 1530, occurred 
simultaneously with the revived hostilities of 
Solyman against Hungary. The Catholics, 
alarmed at his progress, were again forced io 
abandon their bloody purposes and to implore 
the aid of the Protestants. v 

ln A.D. 1532 the treaty o\^ Nuremberg was 
concluded, on condition that the Protestants 
should furnish a subsidy for carrying on the 
war against the Turks. 

In A.D. 1541 Solyman again commenced a 

* Milker, p. 515. 

f Maclane'a Mosheim, vol. i. pp, ^3 ; 34. 



262 ISHMAEL AND THE CHUECH. 

bloody war against the West, resolved on its 
subjugation. It raged most fearfully during 
the sessions of the Council of Trent, wasting 
the invaded provinces with fire and sword, and 
as though in awful providential rebuke of that 
council for consigning the Protestant church to 
Inquisitorial and military destruction. And, 
just in proportion as the Catholics wasted their 
strength and fury upon the suffering church, 
Solyman was successful against them, gaining 
strength and maturing his plans for the con- 
quest of Europe. 

And, finally, when the pacification of Passau 
was pending, "the Turks .... had prepared 
a powerful fleet to ravage the coast of Naples 

and Sicily Besides, Solyman .... had 

ordered into the field an army of a hundred 
thousand men, which, having defeated a great 
body of Ferdinand's troops and taken several 
places of importance, threatened not only to 
complete the conquest of the province, but to 

drive them out of that part of Hungary 

Maurice, having observed Ferdinand's per- 
plexity, .... offered, if peace were re-esta- 
blished on a secure foundation, that he would 
march in person with his troops into Hungary 
against the Turks. Such was the effect of 
this well-timed proposal, that Ferdinand, desti- 



TUE OTTOMANS. 263 



tute of every other prospect of relief, became 
the most zealous advocate whom the confede- 
rates could have employed to urge their 
claims ; and there was hardly any thing that 
they could have demanded which he would 
not have chosen to grant, rather than have 
retarded a pacification to which he trusted as 
the only means of saving his Hungarian 
crown. "* 

In this extraordinary manner was the war of 
extermination against the Protestants, though 
resolved upon, and with hostilities already 
begun in several instances, kept in arrest from 
time to time. The Catholic princes needed 
the aid of their Protestant subjects, and on 
one occasion sought and obtained the aid of 
the condemned Luther's vigorous pen in favour 
of what was termed the defensive war. Pro- 
testant and Catholic were exhorted to make 
common cause against a. common enemy. 

The Reformers experienced for many succes- 
sive years these alternations of papal smiles 
and frowns, supplications and persecutions. 
When the Turks were driven back, her foes 
resorted at once to their cruel remedy for 
heresy, — " the cautery and the knife." But, just 

* Robertson's Charles V. j book x. pp. 412, 413. 



2(3-4 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

as they wore congratulating themselves, and 
were about to sit down to the long-delayed 

banquet of blood, they are suddenly called off 
to meet the tierce Ishmael thundering at their 
invaded gates. 

Thus, while Islamism remained, the woe or 

the scourge o£ Christendom. Protestantism 

>^ 

gradually rose and prevailed. But now. since 
Turkey has commenced her fatal decline and 
is just ready to disappear from Europe. Pro- 
testantism is also in the same perilous con- 
dition there, and is likely to lose very soon 
her last inch of European soil. 

But her decline and that of Turkey is 
accompanied with the steady and simultaneous 
growth of Romanism in Europe and of Pro- 
testantism in America. 

The decline of Protestantism in Europe is 
not at present a loss by persecution or by a 
return of her converts to Popery, but by a 
vast exodus which has lasted for more than a 
century, which still continues and incre; 
and which year by year makes yet more bril- 
liant and unmistakable the luminous footprint 
of the angel in the sea. 



CHAPTER XXXII. 

THE WITNESSES NOT SLAIN. 

The lust arc fallen, unwept, that bore 
The bated cross in days of yore; 

They sleep as though, despite the rack, 
The soul departed might Come back. 

The measurement of the holy places and 
the death and resurrection of the witnesses 
are the next events marked by the prophet, 
and which are to precede and accompany the 
passing away of the second woe. Along this 
track, therefore, let us take our way, that we 
may reach and understand the character and 
tendency of the events of our own times, so 
startling and portentous, and which are hardly 
passed away in a sea of blood ere new and 
threatening masses are beginning to gather and 
to hang heavy and dark over the earth. 

"And there was given me a reed like unto a 
rod: and the angel stood, saying, Rise, and 
measure the temple of God, and the altar, and 
them that worship therein. But the court 
which is without the temple leave out, and 

23 R 205 



266 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

measure it not ; for it is given unto the Gentiles : 
and the holy city shall they tread under foot 
forty and two months."* God took formal 
possession of the land of Canaan by lot. It 
was measured and thus appropriated. -j* This 
method of taking possession of the Holy Land 
made the act of measuring, in prophetic par- 
lance, to signify the appropriation of that which 
was measured. 

To " divide Shechem and mete out the 
valley of Succoth" was all the same as the 
taking actual possession of these places. The 
appearance of an angel with a measuring-line, 
and with it measuring Jerusalem, w T as the reve- 
lation of the divine intention again to take 
possession of the fallen and abandoned city. 

The word of God — "the only infallible rule 
of faith and practice" — began in the early part 
of the seventh century to be used as a mea- 
suring-rod or rule, in its discriminative appli- 
cation to a true and a false Christianity. A 
large proportion of the visible church was by 
this rule declared to have lost its church-state, 
and the Pope in consequence, even as early as 
a.d. 606, w r as quite generally regarded as the 
man of sin. 

* Rev. xi. 1, 2. f Josh. xxiv. 13. 



THE WITNESSES. 267 

The court which was without was a square 
enclosure, covering an area much larger than 
that covered by the temple. Hence, the em- 
blem suggests that the rejected portion of the 
visible church, at the time intended by the 
prophet, should comprise by far the greater 
part of it. This was given to be trodden down 
of Gentile feet, or by idolaters. 

These, it is generally conceded, were the 
Goths and Vandals, who overran and subdued 
the Roman empire, appropriated its religion, 
its lands, and its laws, as their own, and became 
themselves Romans. Christianity, already 
sadly deteriorated, was made far more so under 
the profane alliance with its idolatrous con- 
verts. The Pope and Bishop of Rome aided 
also in its total desecration. He conformed it, 
with misguided zeal, to the pagan tastes of the 
conquerors, that he might thereby the more 
readily turn them into Christians. 

Christianity, while thus appearing to con- 
quer the victors, but conquered itself. The 
conversion was not of barbarism to Chris- 
tianity, but of Christianity to barbarism. Re- 
ligion fell in its holy city, or in the visible 
church ; and, despite the resistance of a small 
and a retreating minority, its rule of faith, its 



208 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

atonement, and its sanctity, were alike trampled 
under Gentile feet. 

The same sagacious ecclesiastic that filled 
the church with idolaters restored also the 
broken succession of the Caesars, by becoming 
himself the true source of imperial and kingly 
power. The imperial, the consular, and the 
senatorial forms of government shone for ages 
in the capital of the Caesars. But the last of 
the Caesars finally disappeared, and the ensigns 
of the throne and of the palace were transferred 
to Constantinople. In the Eternal City, and 
throughout the kingdoms of the West, the 
savages of the North and their successors held 
the mastery. The division of the imperial 
rule between Rome and Constantinople was all 
that saved the empire, at this time, from total 
extinction. The interregnum lasted for two 
hundred years. " The day shone not for a 
third part of it, and the night likewise."* 

From this epoch the Pope and Bishop of 
Rome, proclaimed by the emperor at Constan- 
tinople universal bishop, and being at the 
same time a native Roman and a true patrician, 
took up the fallen sceptre of the Caesars, and, 
by conferring it on Charlemagne, restored the 

* Rev. viii. 12. 



THE WITNESSES. 209 

long-lost glory of the West. From France the 
imperial dignity passed to Germany, and from 
thence, in the memory of many now living, it 
reverted again to France. It was conferred by 
Pius VII. on Napoleon. He assumed the 
golden crown of Charlemagne and the iron 
crown of Italy. 

Home not only restored her ecclesiastical and 
her civil ascendency by her wily and ghostly 
representative; she also recruited her exhausted 
energies by absorbing in her own the hardier 
manhood of Northern nations. The sources of 
her ruin became thus, and in more respects 
than one, the sources of her renovated strength ; 
and she again reigned " over the kings of the 
earth."* It was, indeed, a wonderful event: — 
the actual and the healthful reproduction of 
an expired life, and that in the very moment 
and by the very means of its total extinction. 

But, alas, in thus for the second time setting 
her iron heel on her recovered and submissive 
domain she also placed, as the price of her 
triumph, her dishonoured Christianity under 
Gentile feet. Its true God gave place to patron 
saints and local deities. In all her sanctuaries 
His praise was given to crucifixes and graven 

* Rev. xvii. 18. 
23* 



270 ISHMAEL AND TTIE CIITJRCH. 

images. Its blessed Redeemer was made in- 
ferior to the Virgin, and was set aside in his 
gracious mediation by a vast army of saints and 
martyrs. Its unadorned simplicity of worship 
disappeared in a pompous ritual. Its purify- 
ing and intelligible utterances were supplanted 
by unintelligible and awful mysteries addressed 
to the senses. " Signs and lying wonders" 
were made the incentives to obedience and 
the sources of religious veneration. In a word, 
almost all that was pure, distinctive, and di- 
vine became, as the result, outcast and down- 
trodden in the visible church. 

The period in which this state of things be- 
gan to be is marked, first, by the discriminative 
application of the rule or rod (referred to as 
above by the prophet) in determining the 
limits of the true church. Such use of the word 
had become common in the beginning of the 
seventh century. 

Secondly, in A. D. GOG, when Phocas pro- 
claimed the Pope of Rome universal bishop, he 
became at once to the godty the revealed head 
of the apostasy, and was denounced as the 
Antichrist of this prophecy and of the Scrip- 
tures. 

Thirdly, he was the man of sin before he 
became a temporal prince : since the little 



THE WITNESSES. 271 

horn spoken of by Daniel* was, nevertheless, a 
horn, or power, before it rose above the three 
dynasties which it subverted. Indeed, the 
Pope's subsequent assumption of the dignity of 
a temporal prince was the lesser form of the 
iniquity. These are some of the reasons which 
suggest the propriety of commencing our reck- 
oning of the twelve hundred and. sixty years 
of the prophecy with the commencement of the 
visible exaltation of the Pope to spiritual supre- 
macy in the church, i.e. a.d. 600. 

Another distinct ground on wdiich we arrive 
at the same conclusion may be found in the 
prophecy of Daniel.*)* " The king of fierce 
countenance/' and understanding dark sen- 
tences, arose, according to this prophet, at the 
latter end of the four kingdoms into which 
Alexander's dominions had been divided. He 
terminated their reign when he conquered 
Persia. Mohammed was fierce in the emo- 
tions of his cruel nature and in the principles 
and sympathies of his faith. His successes 
were also achieved by incoherent or dark sen- 
tences. He obtained his Koran J in sentences, 

*Dan. vii. 8. f Dan. viii. 23. 

J "The fragments of the Koran were produced at the 
discretion of Mohammed The pages, without order 



272 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

as he affirmed, in which the last, however 
contradictory, modified and explained all that 
went before. Sentences most dark and contra- 
dictory became also the ultimate foundations 
of his power, gave creation to his army and 
victory to his lieutenants. A coincidence so 
striking should not be overlooked; and it may 
legitimately influence our judgment with re- 
spect to the time of the end, since the rise of the 
Southern Antichrist was evidently sjnnchronical 
with the exaltation of the Papacy. They are 
both the renowned enemies of progress and of 
piety in the North and in the South, originate 
at the same time, run to the present day their 
parallel courses. And is it not a probable con- 
clusion that they are destined to perish nearly 
simultaneously, and especially as to each is 
assigned the same prophetic period ?* 

The period also in which the witnesses were 
to prophesy in sackcloth is the same. And it 
is quite natural to conclude that their sack- 

or connection, were cast into a domestic chest." Farther 
down, on the same page, the Koran is described as " the 
endless, incoherent rhapsody of fable and precept and decla- 
mation, which seldom excites a sentiment or an idea, which 
sometimes crawls in the dust, and is sometimes lost in the 
clouds/' — Gibbon, vol. v. p. 110. 
* Twelve hundred and sixty days. 



THE WITNESSES. 273 

cloth garb was the result of Papal and Moham- 
medan ascendency over the very regions of 
the earth in which a primitive Christianity 
had previously spread her principles and her 
churches. Their respective empires w T ere en- 
gines of fearful misrule and of spiritual desola- 
tion. And during most of the long interval 
that has elapsed — an interval already filling up 
nearly the whole of the assigned cycle — the true 
church has found a bare toleration among the 
Saracens, or a precarious retreat in the gorges 
of bleak and inaccessible mountains. The 
periods of revival, of success, or of repose, have 
been ever brief, and invariably partial. These 
even have had their tears, have been accom- 
panied with political and social oppressions. 
On the whole, in all Papal and in all Moham- 
medan countries, Zion has ever bowed her 
dejected head, has ever been placed in a 
comparatively depressed and sorrowful con- 
dition. 

Her members also have been comparatively 
very inconsiderable ; her home the circum- 
scribed spot occupied by the temple and the 
altar. Such is the small but consecrated en- 
closure; while her numerous and powerful ad- 
versaries are represented as spreading them- 
selves over the whole area of the open court, 



274 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

whose sacred things they impiously monopolize 
and profanely trample. 

Her witnesses, likewise, during this same 
prophetic interval, have been but two, — the 
smallest possible number admissible in law to 
establish a fact. So few indeed have they 
been, that their unbroken succession during 
this prophetic cycle has been often disputed 
by their enemies; and confessedly by us they 
have been, though sufficient, yet barely suffi- 
cient to continue a visible descent and to 
maintain the credibility of a holy testimony in 
a world abandoned elsewhere in all its vast 
communities to the reign of atheism or false 
religion. 

Such is the melancholy image presented by 
the prophet, and such have been the corre- 
sponding realities of history. " And I will give 
power unto my two witnesses, and they shall 
prophesy a thousand two hundred and three- 
score days, clothed in sackcloth. "* 

After the death and resurrection of the 
witnesses the state of oppression shall cease. 
But that blessed hour of Zion's joy and enfran- 
chisement has not yet come. Her foes are first 
to kill her witnesses, before they can rise again 



* Rev. xi. 3. 



TIIE WITNESSES. ZJb 

in the final and joyous prevalence of their 
truth lul prophecy : — "And when they shall have 
finished their testimony," i.e. in sackcloth, "the 
beast that ascencleth out of the bottomless pit 
shall make war against them, and shall over- 
come them and kill them."* Such an event, 
it is maintained by some, has already occurred. 
A brief examination of this question, however, 
must, we think, result in the conviction that, 
sad as has frequently been the state of the true 
church in Catholic Europe, a sadder hour still 
awaits her there. 

In the twelfth century the country of the 
Albigenses was made desolate by the Cru- 
saders, under Simon de Montfort. The testi- 
mony of the witnesses was for a season par- 
tially, if not wholly, suppressed within its terri- 
torial limits. But it was at the same time 
fully uttered in other places. The suppression 
was not such as that represented in the pro- 
phecy, — the deep silence of the grave over all 
the kingdoms of Europe, and that suddenly 
and simultaneously. 

Two hundred years afterward, (a.d. 1400,) 
the Waldenses, in the valley of Pragela, were 
also nearly or quite exterminated. Starving 

* Rev. xi. 7. 



276 ISID1AEL AND THE CHURCH. 

mothers ascended the mountains with their 
children and perished. One hundred and 
eighty little ones were found dead in their 
cradles. Other churches, however, escaped 
the visitation and continued their testimony. 
In A. D. 1460, or sixty years after, in the 
valley of Loyse, four hundred infants were 
smothered in a cave in the arms of their dying 
mothers, and three thousand disciples slain. In 
this valley the church at this time became 
extinct, but not at the same time elsewhere. 

One hundred years subsequently to this, (a.d. 
1560,) the Calabrian Waldenses were wholly 
exterminated. Silence and darkness spread 
over that island in which they had main- 
tained their suffering mission during ninety 
years. But the witnesses still lived and testi- 
fied in many other places in Europe, notwith- 
standing. 

In after-times, the Inquisition consigned the 
true church in Spain to its dungeons, and her 
voice was heard no more among the living in 
that kingdom. Subsequently, her testimony 
was silenced in France. Her Huguenots were 
slain or expatriated. At another time, it was 
for a season suppressed in Scotland by Arch- 
bishop Laud, and by the bloody Mary in Eng- 
land. 



THE WITNESSES. 277 

But these, though terrible, were but par- 
tial, exterminations, — circumscribed fields of 
slaughter, placed at distant intervals from 
each other, occurring in different and wide- 
ly-separated districts and kingdoms; and no 
one of them occurring on any single isolated 
plat, can possibly be claimed to have been at 
any time universal. Rome, indeed, at the suc- 
cessive slaughter of the Albigenses, the Wal- 
denses, the Huguenots, held her jubilees, and 
claimed that the church, in these respective 
areas, was wholly extinct; but she did not 
claim at any period that the church was also 
simultaneously extinct in every other country 
subject to her rule. If she ever did, it was 
falsely, and amid the contradiction of sur- 
rounding facts and existing witnesses. 

But when she shall "kill them" (according 
to this prophecy,) "their dead bodies shall lie 
in the street of the great city, which spiritually 
is called Sodom, and Egypt, where also our 
Lord was crucified; and they of the people, 
and kindreds, and tongues, and nations, shall 
see their dead bodies three days and a half, 
and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put 
in graves. And they that dwell upon the 
earth shall rejoice over them and make merry, 
and shall send gifts one to another, because 

24 



278 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

these two prophets tormented them that dwelt 
on the earth."* 

Thus, when she shall actually hill them, — 
when this hour of her final triumph shall have 
fully come, — she is to survey the whole field 
at once, and, during three years and a half, 
claim on the clearest evidence — evidence 
wholly uncontradicted and universally con- 
vincing — that they are no more. On the 
highway of the great spiritual city — her great 
ecclesiastical domain, covering ten kingdoms 
with its mighty hierarchy and ghostly rule, 
the broad frequented thoroughfare of peoples 
and nations, kindreds and tongues, a spectacle 
for the whole world to gaze at — their bodies 
shall lie exposed to every eye, shall be spurned 
by every foot. 

The jubilee also, like the massacre, shall be 
universal. It shall not, as heretofore, confine 
itself to Italy, but shall comprehend all the 
kingdoms subject to Papal domination. If an 
event like this had ever occurred, its great publi- 
city, as well as its unprecedented cruelty, would 
have so chronicled it in the annals of every 
age, that to have questioned it now would have 
been simply absurd, and quite impossible. 

* Rev. xi. 



THE WITNESSES. 279 

And, if the witnesses have not 3-et been 
slain, we cannot now, at this late day, go 
back to the seventh century in commencing 
our computation of the prophetic interval 
under consideration. 

But not only has the event not taken place 
as described in the prophecy: the witnesses 
themselves are witnesses against this conclu- 
sion, since they still exist, still prophesy in 
sackcloth, in all Papal countries, — are still de- 
pressed, disfranchised, and sorrowful. A single 
glance at the state of the Protestant church 
in Europe must satisfy the most incredulous 
that her present state is more deplorable by 
far than it was three hundred years ago. But 
if the death and resurrection of her witnesses 
has taken place long since, why does she still 
prophesy in sackcloth,— since, when the de- 
parted life revives in the dead bodies of the 
fallen witnesses and they stand upon their 
feet, the sackcloth drops from them and they 
are ever after exalted to heaven? The death 
and resurrection of the witnesses is therefore, 
we conclude, an event yet to come; and the 
state of things in Europe, according to this 
view of the question, must become worse than 
it now is for Zion before it can become better. 

The causes and tendencies of recent convul- 



280 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

sions, and of the present precarious peace, in- 
vest themselves therefore with great religious 
as well as political interest, and awaken an in- 
tense desire in all to know what are to be the 
events which are now imminent in the out- 
goings of that Providence whose footfalls 
and marshallings are already shaking the 
earth, "and with fear of change perplexing 
monarchs." 



CHAPTER XXXIII. 

ISIDIAEL AND THE WESTERN ALLIES. 

" Proud Saracen, pollute no more 
The shrines by martyrs built of yore i 
From each wild mountain's trackless crown 
In vain thy gloomy castles frown." 

Warton. 

The invaders of the empire from the North, 
inured to hardness, though they prostrated, 
nevertheless renovated, the kingdoms of the 
West. The effeminate offspring of patrician 
luxury, mingling their blood with the rude 
conquerors of their shattered states, restored 
again the bone and muscle of earlier and 
better days. 

But the Eastern division of the empire lost 
its Asiatic provinces without experiencing a 
corresponding benefit. A humanity already 
greatly deteriorated still continued to mingle 
blood with blood, and to carry down among 
the Grecians a progressive physical and social 
degeneracy. Asiatic Greece was absorbed by 
Ishmael. In the wreck of its cities and pro- 
vinces there originated an amalgamation of 

24* S 281 



282 ISHMAEL AND TIIE CHURCH. 

its races with their Arab conquerors. This 
counteracted for generations the tendency to 
national weakness, and gave to the empire of 
the caliphs its prestige and stability. Its 
races, possessed of a mightier manhood, were 
born to dominion. 

While, therefore, the West and the South, 
the Latins and the Saracens, rose up in a 
renovated humanity, the East, isolated by her 
position and repelled by her antipathies, was 
not reached or benefited by the rushing and 
restless tides of social change or of physical re- 
generation. Greece, the world's admired centre 
of learning and refinement, though possessed of 
every other advantage over the Latins and the 
Saracens, was nevertheless utterly incapable of 
self-defence, — was daily tending, by the opera- 
tion of an irresistible law, to national decay 
and political ruin. 

In her rise to supremacy in the fourth 
century, her Constantinople, at that time the 
world's proud imperial capital, became also the 
metropolis of Christendom and assumed a pro- 
tectorate over all its sacred places. The de- 
cline of Rome transferred ultimately to her 
the imperial purple and gave to her the tem- 
porary supremacy. This she feebly grasped, 
and therefore but briefly held. The revived 



THE WESTERN ALLIES. 283 

energy o the Latins oppressed her effeminacy, 
and the Roman bishop at every turn of fortune 
and of controversy came up in the ascendant, 
obtaining ultimately from Constantinople, and 
by imperial proclamation, the spiritual lord- 
ship over the East and the West. 

Just at this juncture also, and most unfortu- 
nately for the Greek church, Ishmael gained 
his terrible nationality and rushed fiercely 
from the desert. Greece could not resist; and 
Asia was lost to the church and to Csesar. 

The holy places, sacred to the memory of 
Christ and his apostles, from this unpropitious 
hour became the objects of a painful interest. 
Images were broken, altars subverted, cruci- 
fixes trampled, and the holy sepulchre itself 
marred and defiled. 

The Crusades of the Middle Ages were under- 
taken to retrieve these losses, and to restore to 
the church a spot so blended in her visions 
with all that now to her was most awful and 
most tender in her recollections of her Lord. 

The Crusaders obtained and held disputed 
possession of the Holy Land, and protected it 
from Moslem profanation; but it was a hope- 
less and a wasteful protectorate. An uncon- 
genial climate and the scimitar thinned the 
ranks of Christian armies, deprived them of 



284 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

their conquests, and brought back upon mis- 
guided Europe a bloody retaliation. In the 
event she herself was invaded, the last of the 
Caesars fell, and to this day "the crescent sur- 
mounts the cross on the dome of St. Sophia." 

Napoleon I., though he arose in the first 
instance as a popular leader, discovered the 
highway to supreme power to be through the 
church. His crown must come from papal 
hands, his legitimacy from the unction of 
St. Peter, the stability of his throne from the 
banks of the Tiber. He hence became a true 
son of the church, catered to her superstitions, 
and merited her blessing by the protection 
which he extended over her holy places at 
Jerusalem. 

When he, however, fell before the stern Mus- 
covite, the protectorate fell also into other 
hands, — was assumed by the czar, who, with- 
out contradiction, has been permitted to retain 
it till recently, as though it had been ever his, 
held in his own right, and that by common 
consent. In executing the commission con- 
ferred in this protectorate, he gradually en- 
croached upon the territories of the Ottomans. 

The Sublime Porte, cognizant of the con- 
tinued desecration of the holy places, was 
nevertheless appealed to in vain by Nicholas. 



TIIE WESTERN ALLIES. 285 

Its subjects could not be restrained. The 
antipathies of Ishmael to churches, altars, 
crucifixes, holy places, and holy things, were 
legitimate, were ever conscientious and on a 
religious account. He was ever the sworn and 
bloody foe of idolatry. In every place, and 
especially at Jerusalem, the venerated remains 
of a Christian antiquity, held most inviolably 
sacred by the church, was ever made the object 
of his most implacable rage and violence. 

This it is which has unhinged the world's 
harmonies for more than twelve hundred years. 
In the Middle Ages it roused Europe to the 
wars of the cross, and that by outrages com- 
mitted on devotees peaceably though super- 
stitiously gathered around the sepulchre of 
their Lord. The indignities also practised 
upon the bishop of the Greek church and the 
Kussian consul at Jerusalem on Easter Monday, 
supplemented as it was by a forcible transfer 
of stipulated sanctuary privileges from the 
Greek to the Latin Christians, led to the 
recent war of the Allies. 

In a.d. 1673, it was conceded to Louis XIV. 
by the sultan, in a treaty, "that the King of 
France be recognised the sole protector of 
the Catholics in the East." Secondly, "that 
churches be erected or repaired without the 



286 ISHMAIL AND TUK CHURCH. 

previous authorization of the Porte." Thirdly, 
"thai the holy shrines shall be restored to the 
possession o( the Latins, because they were 
conquered by Frenchmen in the Crusades/ 1 
But subsequent changes had materially altered 
the relations of parties, and the holy places, 
in the judgment o( many, bad, both injustice 
and in fact, fallen back again to the Greek 
protectorate. 

In a.p. 1850, Prance revived her claim, 
based upon the above-named expired treaty; 
but Napoleon was then a feeble recency in wag 
and in diplomacy, and the threatening attitude 
of Nicholas Led him to waive tor the moment 

his claim. 

In the subsequent agitations of the questions 

at issue. Prance appears as the protector of the 

Latin, and Russia of the Greek Christians 
within the Turkish dominions. The war had 
placed Turkey under the control of the Allies; 
and. while it was claimed "that no Power 
shall claim the right of exercising an official 
protectorate over the subjects of the Sublime 
Porte, no matter to which rite they belong,* 1 
France effectually protected the Catholic 
Greeks in Turkey. 

The sultan hail, on one occasion, determined 
to expel all Greeks not his own subjects from 



THE WESTERN ALLIES, 287 

Constantinople. It was on account of the ani- 
mosity of the Greeks against the Turks. It was 
normal, it was universal; and no Greek could be 
trusted, whether he belonged to the one or the 
other rite. France at once demanded that all 
Greeks belonging to the Catholic church should 
be made an exception to the rule. The sultan 
refused to make any exception. "The French 
ambassador," says the London Times, "there- 
upon took fire, and demanded nothing short 
of the dismissal of the Turkish ministers, on 
whom the conduct of the war and the ex- 
istence of the empire depend, and vowed that 
if satisfaction were refused he should em- 
bark with his whole embassy in forty-eight 
hours." 

Thus the depression of the Greek and the 
exaltation of the Catholic church followed in 
the train of the alliance, and signalized the 
decline of the Kussian protectorate. 

If a quarrel arose at Jerusalem between the 
Greek and Latin Christians, the Latins were 
protected ; the Greeks had no one to speak on 
their behalf. 

France obtained a firman to build a church 
in the Holy Land. The Pacha of Jerusalem 
is instructed to purchase and present a piece 
of ground for the building. A similar applica- 



288 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

lion, formally made by Prince Menschikoff, 
uas refused. 

The A.rchbishop of Paris predicts that, in the 
evenl of the overthrow oi' Russia, the dominion 
of the Papacy >vill become universal. 

"It is," says the Roman archbishop in Que- 
bec, kk the cause of the church which has been 
committed to the armies of Prance and Eng- 
land ; and their success while defending Turkey 
againsl an unjust aggression on the part of the 
enemy will, at the same time, secure to the 
church the twofold advantage of diminishing 
schismatioaJ influence in the Bast, and of esta- 
blishing Catholicism on a more favourable and 
independent footing." 

In the peace-negotiations, first and last, the 
phenomena thai attended each step were their 
everfavourable phase toward the progress of 

llio Latin church. 

"Letters from Rome state that the Pope had 
received from the czar an autograph letter 
which announced the restoration of lour Ro- 
man Catholic bishops in Poland, and the esta- 
blishment of six others in Russia. 11 

Constantinople has ever been, and ye\ is, the 
great and dreaded rival of Rome. The Latin 
sect is but a secession from the Greek. The 
Greek is the mother-church. The fall of 



THE WESTERN All II I. 



289 



Constantinople, in ld. L458, was the fall of 
Home's great competitor, and the dawn of 
her most hopeful processes of proselytism and 
absorption. 

Her missionaries are ever active throughout 
tin 4 Bast, and their successes by no means in- 
oonsiderable. Her plans have been most com- 
prehensive; the anticipated results most mag- 
nificent. Her sober attempts after universal, 
temporal, and spiritual rule — the mastery over 
the souls and the bodies of men— surpass the 
wildest dreams of earthly ambition. These, in 
her darkest reverses, have never been inter- 
mitted, [nail the alternations of her change 
lul fori lines, during the revolutions of ages, she 
has Qot, for a, single moment, lost sight of her 
proudest aspirations; and while she retains her 
organic life she never will. 

The policy of every cabinet which she 
rules must, whatever other interest it secures, 

secure her ultimate triumph. The A Dglioan, 

the Protestant, and the Greek Christians are 
alike her rivals, aiid they are alike marked for 

(he sacrifice. 'The emperor in her interest is 
alike the enemy of them all. 1 1 i M compliant 

protectorate will spread its ages over the Latin 

church, :iii(l oxer that. only. The lolcra.lion 
of Christians Of all sects by the Porle is one 



290 ISHMAEL AND TnE CHURCH. 

thing; the protectorate of Napoleon is quite 
another. 

The battle of Navarino, that broke the power 
of Turkey, placed that power completely at 
the mercy of her natural foe; and her remark- 
able preservation to the present day can only 
be accounted for by an inquiry into the ob- 
vious policies of Rome. 

Turkey has found grace in her sight, that 
Greece might perish. The fall of Turkey before 
the successful encroachments of Russia would 
have restored the Greek empire, and would 
have placed at the head of its revived fortunes 
a race surpassed by no other in ambition or in 
battle ; and the contest so long and so advan- 
tageously conducted against the Greek church 
would have ended in defeat and shame. The 
czar is, therefore, beaten back, and the hated 
Turk fostered, that the dominions of the Otto- 
mans may be kept open to the continued prose- 
lytisms of Rome. 

The overthrow of Russia, in the opinion of 
the Archbishop of Paris, will open the way for 
universal Papal ascendency. 

Turkey is the packhorse of France and Italy; 
and when she ceases to be of any further use 
she will be turned out upon the common to 
die. 



THE WESTERN ALLIES. 291 

England, in her solicitude for her Eastern 
possessions, was drawn into a war against her 
Anglican establishment and her Protestantism. 
Every blow of her sturdy arm, while it weak- 
ened the Greek church, served to strengthen 
her far mightier foe, and to put in jeopardy 
more and more her own precious faith. 



CHAPTER XXXIV. 

ROME — HER ASPIRATIONS. 

"The woman which thou sawest is that great city which reigneth 
over the kings of the earth." — St. John. 

The following pages, so far as they relate 
to unfulfilled prophecy, are introduced to close 
my theme. I do not set them down as certain- 
ties, but as my speculative opinions on debat- 
able questions; — questions whose satisfactory 
solution must ever be left to the revelations of 
time. 

How striking the picture of the combined 
weakness and strength of Rome! She is a 
woman, most delicate and frail; but she is 
supported by a monster of enormous propor- 
tions, on whose back she rides, and whose 
crowned horns sustain and adorn her glitter- 
ing tiara. She was called to judgment at 
Constance, sat weak and defenceless before the 
tribunal that arraigned her, but rode away 
at last triumphant over her foes, — over the 
ashes of Huss and Jerome, and with princes 

292 



ROME. 293 

at her bridle-rein. Napoleon I. lorclcd it 
over her in the verdancy of his career, but 
bowed his neck to her iron yoke at last. 
She held her soft palm on the gateway of 
legitimacy. Her unction made sacred the per- 
sons of kings and emperors. She controlled 
the opinions of his subjects and of Europe; 
and their veneration for him, on a religious 
account, was to him every thing. She gave 
him his crown; he, in his turn, supported 
her ecclesiastical supremacy. He became 
strong in her strength; she became strong 
in his. 

His act in taking the crown out of the 
hand of the pontiff and placing it on his own 
head, though it tended to deceive the vulgar, 
changed not the fact respecting his imperial 
homage and servility. He became religious 
from policy. He supported and carried the 
Pope, that he might the more securely support 
and carry his crown. 

The Revolution of 1848 exalted the present 
imperial despot to the throne of his illustrious 
uncle. This same revolution made his Holi- 
ness a fugitive, until the bayonets of French- 
men restored and supported his fallen strength. 
And, indeed, from the time that Phocas, Pepin, 
and Charlemagne gave him the mastery, until 

25* 



294 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

this day, his strength has ever been in the 
support of Catholic princes. 

There is nothing abnormal in the inter- 
ference of foreign troops in the affairs of 
Italy. It has ever been the fact; and that 
fact has ever been one striking illustration 
of the prophecy. The Pope is in himself a 
cipher, but he is strong in the power of his 
imperial supporters. 

Where is the mighty Protestantism of the 
League of Passau? The throne of the sove- 
reign pontiff toppled before it, and his im- 
perial defender sought refuge in a compliant 
treaty from its iron grasp. But look now on 
that broad field of its triumph, and where is 
its power? Let the martyred blood of a mil- 
lion Huguenots respond from the Khone ! Let 
Catholicized Geneva answer. Let Holland, 
once the keystone in the arch that supported 
the great Keformation, reply from amid the 
ruins of her crumbling towers. Let Hungary 
answer, now hung up " like the empty and 
bleeding skin of a slaughtered victim." Let 
Prussia answer, the last stronghold left, — 
bearded now, and reluctantly admitted to 
the peace-councils of the Allies at Paris 

Such are some of the melancholy shadow- 
in gs of the recent war, whose thunders have 



ROME. 295 

been breaking along the confines of two ages, 
heralding the outgoing of the one and the in- 
coming of the other. 

Ishmael, with a piece of bread and a bottle 
of water, turns again his pale face toward the 
wilderness. The death-wail of expiring Greece 
is heard on the coast of the Black Sea. The 
protectorate has fallen to Napoleon and to 
Rome. Protestant Prussia has been menaced 
on the Rhine and scorned; and she is looking 
this way and that way, like one at his wits' 
end. England likewise — Protestant England 
— has been shocked at her successive mis- 
fortunes. Her lion slinks to his lair, while 
the sea and the waves thereof are roaring, and 
"men's hearts are failing them for fear and for 
looking after those things that are coming on 
the earth." 

The final war upon the witnesses, it is with 
reason believed, is just at hand. The ter- 
mination of the late war has not settled the 
"Italian question." It is a volcano whose 
smothered tones will probably soon find utter- 
ance and amaze the world. The witnesses 
must fall. The beast shall overcome and kill 
them. Even their wild halls of nature's ma- 
sonry in the Alps shall soon be deserted, and 
their Northern and insular retreats refuse them 



ESHXAEL im Till- CHURCH, 

both life and sepulture. Across the left foot- 
print of the angel disastrous twilight is sweep- 
ing, and thunderin&s and lightnings and voices 
and groat hail are deepening the gloom of the 
descending night. 

Such are the visions that, since the Revo- 
lution of 1848, tlit alike athwart the political 
and the prophetic horizon. They arc of pale 
and of expiring things; of old and of worn- 
out confederacies and nationalities. Their 
death-groans reach us even across the ocean, 
and their vanishing tonus are fast disappearing 
behind the shadows of an everlasting evening. 
Thcv are also of more hopeful things. — of 
another age. whose young life is already coming 
in on the coasts of a New World. To it the 
tprint of the angel in the sea led the way, 
and in it they sing the song of Moses the 
I, and the song of the Lamb 

rning their eye, and "watch 
they that watch for the morn;: 
A :c\\ she::} cars arc ; med. accord 

.' prophetic time, to accom- 
plish tin h of the witnesses. The 
ressions - shall then have 
reached . testimony shall then 
have been finished, and their garb of sackcloth 
dyed in . 



ROME. 297 

In the streets of Hint great ecclesiastical 
city — thai city steeped in the lust of Sodom, 
dark with Egyptian cruelty, the spot also of 
our Lord's perpetual crucifixion in the sacrifice 
of the mass — shall the fearful tragedy openly 
proceed, and reveal load its scenes of remorse- 
less and deliberate murder. 

This awful event precedes the passing away 
of the second woo; and, judging from the 
rapidly-declining star of [shmael, (if we had 
no other guide,) the catastrophe must be re- 
garded as nigh, — yea, even at the doors. 

The prophet, however, skirts the gloomy pic- 
ture with a fringe of light. This Budden and 
destructive revival of papal oppression is to be 
brief and dual, — the last, fatal eruption of the 
spiritual Etna, — its unexpected and its suicidal 
victory. And though no Cromwell then shall 
live to expostulate and threaten, — no surviving 
Milton cry, 

w Avenge, Lord, thy slaughtered s:iin(s, whose bones 
Lie scatter* d on the Alpine mountains cold," — 

yet in the short space of three years and a 
half the. witnesses shall themselves revive and 
open again their testimony in cottages and 

palaces, and amid the demon-revels of the 

amazed Antichrist, 

T 



298 ISHMAEL AND TIIE CHURCH. 

And, ere she shall recover from her despair, 
or be able to rally her forces, unexpected 
political confederacies shall form around the 
joyous witnesses and call them up to places of 
honour and security. 

And in the same hour, simultaneously, the 
tenth part of the city shall fall, and in one 
out of the ten kingdoms despotism find a 
bloody grave. Such is the prophetic picture 
of the antecedents and concomitants of the 
passing away of the second woe. 



CHAPTER XXXV. 

THE FALL OF ISLAMISM. 

" This is the Moslem's hour of prayer ! 
'Twas Judah's once ; but fane and priest, 
Altar and sacrifice, have ceased." 

Montgomery. 

The second woe reached its height in the 
fall of Constantinople. And when the Ottoman 
shall relinquish his European conquests and 
retire to his old dominions in the Euphrates, 
the woe shall have passed away. 

The Ottomans had a national being before 
they became a woe ; and when they cease to 
be a woe they do not also necessarily cease to 
be a nation. Their nationality, it is believed, 
indeed, will end; but it will be at another 
time and place than the present or than 
Europe. When the return of expatriated Isaac 
shall be resisted by them in Asia, then shall 
they " fall without hand/' or by the immediate 
interposition of Heaven. Rejected from the 
patrimony of Isaac by the great Proprietor of 
heaven and earth, they in after-ages invaded 

299 



300 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

and obtained it by violence; but, as their illus- 
trious father fell in his first contest in the tent 
of Abraham, and Sarah's bitter words prevailed 
to make the scoffer an outcast, so in the final 
issue he shall fall again, and that hopelessly, 
before the better destiny of his injured brother. 

The following prophecy seems descriptive 
of the event : — " The sixth angel poured out 
his vial upon the great river Euphrates, and 
the water thereof was dried up, that the way 
of the kings of the East might be prepared."* 

The Euphrates flowed under the walls and 
through the midst of the ancient Babylon, fur- 
nishing the city with an abundant supply of 
water, and enabling it to hold out indefinitely 
in a siege. Cyrus dried up this bed of the 
river by digging new channels, into which he 
turned the current, and opened thus, under the 
walls, an ample passage for his invading army. 

Having taken the city by this stratagem, he 
made it the capital of the Persian empire. 
From that time the Babylonian ceased to 
exist, — dried up like the channel of its river. 
It became henceforth absorbed and lost in that 
of the Persian. 

Hence, in Scripture parlance, the drying up 
of the Euphrates had both a literal and a figu- 

* Rev. xvi. 12. 



TIIE FALL OF ISLAMISU. 301 

rative meaning. According to the latter, it 
signified the amalgamation with their con- 
querors of the people that might at any time 
be in possession of the ancient Chaldea. The 
Babylonian empire was lost in the Persian; 
the Persian in the Saracenic; the Saracenic in 
the Turkish. The prophet, in the above-quoted 
passage, points to a period in which the last- 
named occupier of this renowned site of Ori- 
ental despotism is to take the course and 
share the fate of its several predecessors. 

The Ottomans rose to power on the Eu- 
phrates. They in after-ages made Constanti- 
nople their capital. They have, however, never 
lost their original territorial possessions on the 
Euphrates. And when in coming years they 
lose their hold on Europe and return again 
to this first and last stronghold of their na- 
tional existence, they are but to return home 
to die. 

According to this view of the subject, the 
second woe and the sixth vial relate to dif- 
ferent events, but both belong successively to 
the history of the same people. The Ottomans 
rise as the Euphratean horsemen, retain this 
designation appropriately ever after, and return 
again at the time of the end to find in this 
very region their national sepulchre. The 



302 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

passing away of the second woe, it is obvious, 
would not necessarily involve any more than 
the exclusion of the Turks from Europe ; since 
it became the second woe when the Turks, 
loosed from their restraints in the Euphrates, 
invaded Europe and became masters of the 
Eastern capital. When, therefore, they shall 
retire again to their original domain in Asia, 
the second woe will have passed away. 

But in the effusion of the sixth vial there 
is more indicated than the passing away of a 
woe, — the termination of a scourge to Chris- 
tendom. It intimates that the very people 
composing that woe are thereafter no longer 
to be reckoned among the nations; that, 
when the angel shall empty the vial and spread 
his cloud, the pestilential drops that shall con- 
dense and fall shall bedew the pale brow of 
the expiring Ishmael and prove fatal to his 
very being. His great national artery shall 
cease to flow, and his succession be cut off by 
pestilence or war, or by amalgamation, and 
disappear as perfectly as a river whose channel 
becomes dry, — the future field for the shepherd 
and the reaper. 

It is a reasonable conclusion, also, that, as the 
two great antagonists to the world's social and 
Christian regeneration have a distinct descrip- 



THE FALL OF ISLAMISM. 303 

tion assigned to them in the prophecy, as to 
their origin and progress, so, not only the one, 
but also the other, should have some distinct 
indication of their end. 

The plagues are represented as preparing 
the way for the universal prevalence of Christ's 
kingdom on earth by destroying successively 
the enemies of his reign in the West. They 
sweep on in close proximity until they fall 
finally on the very seat of the beast, crushing 
the very heart of despotism, bearing throne, 
sceptre, and tiara into the chasm that had 
smouldered for ages underneath the chair of 
St. Peter. And why should we conclude that 
another and an equally-determined enemy of 
our Lord in the East should now escape ? Did 
not the angel lift up his hand to heaven, and 
swear by Him that liveth forever and ever, who 
created the heavens and the things that therein 
are, and the earth and the things that therein 
are, and the sea and the things that are 
therein, that there should be no longer any 
delay, but that God would finish the mystery 
when the seventh angel should begin to sound ? 

The seven last plagues were surely the 
fulness of plagues and the final end of venge- 
ful visitations, since they were to reach and 
bear away every stronghold of iniquity from 



304 ISIIMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

the bosom of a sin-burdened world. The 
direction to the angels to pour out their vials 
upon the earth, as they were to prepare the 
way for the millennium, must have compre- 
hended at least those portions of the earth still 
at that time covered with oppressive govern- 
ments and with false religions. And they 
could not therefore have taken simply the 
circuit of Europe and have finally paused at 
Kome, but must have continued on their way 
till every other centre of evil had been reached 
and obliterated. 

The first, accordingly, hovers over the citadal 
of political despotism ; the second, over the 
spot where vast fleets of armed oppressors lie 
congregated in capacious harbours, ready to 
spread their sails and dye the sea with Chris- 
tian blood; the third, over the rivers and 
fountains of the Ligurian Alps. The fourth 
pauses just over the broad disc of the imperial 
sun; the fifth, over the chair of the triple 
tyrant. The sixth rests not till he reaches 
his station in the centre of Asia, spreading the 
plague-spot over the doomed sultanies. And 
the seventh and the last rises above the prince of 
the power of the air. And, since all evil poten- 
cies are included, Islamism must also in these 
plagues have its days numbered and finished. 



TIIE FALL OF ISLAMISM. 305 

That this plague relates to Islamism is fur- 
ther evident, since the object for which the 
vial is poured out is the removal of the great 
barrier opposed to the return of the kings of 
the East. The Jews were opposed in their 
exodus from Egypt by the Egyptians, and the 
Canaanites crossed their march and obstructed 
their entrance into the Holy Land. The 
Mohammedans of the present day would be 
equally certain to refuse them peaceable pos- 
session of their own country, were they now to 
commence in great numbers their final immi- 
gration into it. 

Daniel, in the eleventh chapter of his pro- 
phecy, is believed to describe this very opposi- 
tion 3 and Zechariah, (chapter xiv. verse 12,) 
the consequent miraculous ruin of the unblest 
foe at the time of converted Israel's restoration. 

The East likewise is the place of early dawn. 
A bright star, as the harbinger of the sun, 
flames on the forehead of the morning. Hence, 
it has been common among sacred writers to 
describe any great spiritual or literal appear- 
ance of our Lord by a reference to these 
agreeable and beautiful objects. His advent 
is called the "day-spring from on high." A 
star seen in the east was the sign of it, and the 
guide of the wise men. His people " shine as 

26* 



306 ISHMAEL AND TIIE CHURCH. 

lights in the world," — "are made kings and 
priests unto God." And "the kingdom and 
the greatness of the kingdom under the whole 
heaven is to be given to his saints." Of this 
great kingdom Jerusalem is to be the metro- 
polis, and in it the throne and the succession 
is to be restored to the house of David. 

God gave the Holy Land to Abraham and 
to his seed. It was to be their patrimony and 
their residence while the sun and moon should 
endure and rule the alternations of day and 
night. From it they were temporarily rejected 
for their criminal rejection of their Lord; but 
the very sentence containing the statement of 
this fact implies also their ultimate restora- 
tion: — "Jerusalem shall be trodden down of 
the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles 
shall be fulfilled." 

First in the series of instruments, the Ko- 
mans trampled with iron foot this sacred and 
appropriated heritage. It was made by them 
the theatre of war and bloodshed. Other 
countries could be held in subjection in the 
peaceable exercise of power by these conque- 
rors of the world; but this could not. Its 
inhabitants sternly and perseveringiy resisted. 
It was therefore of necessity covered with gar- 
risons and patrolled and harassed by exaspe- 



TIIE FALL OF ISLAMISM. 307 

rated soldiers. Its vineyards and gardens were 
turned into places for camps, battles, and 
sieges ; nor would the infatuated tribes yield, 
until their cities were razed to the ground and 
they themselves slain or expatriated. 

With unbroken resolution and a terrible 
courage, they ever forced the alternative upon 
their masters of either abandoning the pro- 
vince altogether or of holding possession of it 
by a military force. It could not therefore be 
cultivated and made fruitful and remunerative. 
Rome could but cover it with the ruin of its 
walled towns, break down its hedges, and set 
an armed heel on its desolate bosom. 

The Romans lost Palestine just as they 
gained it, — by violence. The Saracens suc- 
ceeded to its bloody rule in their turn, and 
made it the camping-ground for their camels 
and horses, and marred every remaining ves- 
tige of architectural taste or cultivated beauty. 
It was wrested in the end also from their 
hands, and that by a new race of conquerors, 
who, strangers alike to policy or humanity, 
roused the nations to the wars of the cross. 
It was held alternately by one or the other 
among the contending parties for a time; but 
no permanent or desirable conquests were 
made by any. In it "many were over- 



308 ISHMAEL AND THE CIIURCII. 

thrown." In it, for ages, Europe, Asia, and 
Africa met, not to plant and build and restore, 
but to pluck up and cast down and to defile. 

But the Crusaders had their day and their 
end. Their armies perished finally around the 
sepulchre which they defended, and its hoary 
walls were again broken by the hammer of the 
Moslem. 

A new foe also rushed upon the plains of 
Asia from the distant East. Tamerlane, in his 
turn, at the head of fifteen hundred thousand 
horse, swept and trampled the devoted patri- 
mony. He too had his day, and was suc- 
ceeded by the Turks, who, to this hour, efface 
its beauty, oppress its children, and, by tread- 
ing it down with Gentile feet, continue to fulfil 
the prophecy. 

But this desolation is not to be perpetual. 
That land is yet to be happy and prosperous. 
Its wilderness is to become as Eden, its desert as 
the garden of God. The language in the text 
under consideration is in striking contrast with 
that employed to describe the fate of Babylon, 
of Koine, and of the tribes of Ishmael. 

Of Babylon it is said, " It shall never be in- 
habited. The satyr is to dance in its streets, 
the wild beasts of the island are to cry in its 
desolate houses, and dragons in its pleasant 



THE FALL OF ISLAMISM. 309 

chambers. Never more in it shall the Arabian 
pitch his" tent, or the shepherd make his fold. 
It shall be a possession for the bittern and for 
pools of water." Said the great Avenger, " I 
will sweep it with the besom of destruction." 

Eome is to be "utterly burned with lire;" 
is to sink and disappear in the volcano that 
shall open under her walls like "a millstone 
cast into the sea." The significant language 
of the angel is, as she is seen to descend into 
the abyss, " She shall be found no more at 
all." 

The tribes of Ishmael are likewise to perish, 
to be absorbed like a river lost in deep basins 
opened underneath its pebbly bed. 

But of Jerusalem it is said, "She shall be 
trodden down of the Gentiles until the times 
of the Gentiles be fulfilled ;" and — surely it is 
here intimated — not after that. The scene is 
then, we justly infer, suddenly to change. Her 
children are to return, to be "as aforetime," 
and the voice of lamentation and the shout of 
the oppressor to be hushed along her length- 
ened ruins. 

" The kings of the East" reside in the East, 
but in exile, as is suggested by the drying up 
of a river to prepare the way for their ascension 
to power, — the removal of the oppressors from 



310 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

their soil that its legitimate owners and right- 
ful rulers may occupy it. 

The Jews, though dispersed into every land, 
are to be found in greater numbers in Eastern 
Asia or beyond the Euphrates than in all other 
places. And, when the tidings of their gather- 
ing in vast bodies, — now at length penitent for 
their rejection of their Lord, — with the pur- 
pose of resettling in their long-lost Canaan, 
shall reach the ears of Ishmael, the cupidity 
and the enmity of the outcast and the usurper 
shall revive, " and he shall go forth with great 
fury to destroy and utterly to make away 
many;" yet "he shall come to his end, and 
none shall help him."* 

And when "he shall plant the tabernacle 
of his palace between the seas," (the Medi- 
terranean and the Dead Seas,) "in the glori- 
ous holy mountains," (of Judea,) — when his 
camp shall thus cover the whole frontier, his 
troops man every mountain-pass and walled 
town, and guard every avenue to the Holy 
Land, — then shall be seen this great river, the 
river Euphrates, stretching from shore to shore, 
and sweeping on with its standards and tents 
and turbans, in a channel deep, broad, and 

* Dan. xi. 44, 45. 



THE FALL OF ISLAMIST. 311 

impassable, between returning Israel and the 
land of their lathers. 

And it is this river over which the angel 
hovers, and which he curtains with pestilen- 
tial wreaths from his vial, and in whose sepul- 
chral basins vanish forever the Euphratean 
Pharaohs. 

u This," says Zechariah, " shall be the plague 
wherewith the Lord will smite all the people 
that have fought against Jerusalem; Their 
llesh shall consume away while they stand 
upon their feet, and their eyes shall consume 
away in their holes, and their tongue shall 

consume away in their mouth And so 

shall be the plague of the horse, of the mule, 
of the camel, and of the ass, and of all the 
beasts that shall be in these tents, as this 
plague." And, as the Israelites spoiled the 
Egyptians, so in this event they shall spoil the 
smitten Ottomans. "The wealth of all the 
heathen round about shall be gathered to- 
gether, gold, and silver, and apparel, in great 

abundance In that day shall there be 

upon the bells of the horses, Holiness unto the 
Lord." 

According to Ezekiel xxxix., seven months 
should be spent in burying the dead on the 
coasts of the sea to cleanse the land ; and after 



312 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

the seven months the authorities " shall sever 
out men of continual employment" to search 
for stray bodies and scattered bones, to bury 
them; and the passenger who in his tour 
through the land should chance to discover 
a bone should be required to "set up a sign 
by it, till the buriers should bury it." 

"And at that time shall Michael stand up, 
the great prince which standeth for the chil- 
dren of thy people : and there shall be a time 
of trouble, such as there never was since there 
was a nation even to that same time ; and at 
that time thy people shall be delivered, every 
one that shall be found written in the book."* 

Thus, the drama that opens in the tent of 
Abraham, and reopens in the cave of Hara, 
closes with the return of converted Israel to his 
native land. A dark pall drops on Mameluke 
and Fatemite, Saracen and Turk ; the shadows 
of the long night roll back, and the latter-day 
glory dawns, after the lapse of intervening 
ages, on the renovated fortunes of the house of 
David. 

* Dan. xi. 1. 



CHAPTER XXXYI. 



ISAAC S PATRIMONY RESTORED. 



"Nor is there — so is she bereft — 
One stone upon another left. 
The cross and crescent shine afar, 
But where is Jacob's natal star ?" 

Montgomery. 



In the sixth chapter of the Epistle to the 
Romans, Paul insists that the promise to 
Abraham and to his seed was through the 
righteousness of faith ; by which principle it 
was that Abraham became the father of many 
nations. Not a lineal descent, but faith in 
Christ, constituted any one a member of the 
patriarch's great commonwealth. 

While faith thus inducted strangers and 
aliens and made them fellow-citizens of the 
saints and of the household of faith, the want 
of it correspondingly excluded his natural de- 
scendants from that condition. Ishmael, the 
scoffer and the persecutor, though a child of 
Abraham, lost by his impiety all connection 
with the covenants of promise. The question 

27 U 313 



314 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

of legitimacy was not mooted ; it was his un- 
belief, his rejection of the Messiah, that ex- 
cluded him. 

Esau, likewise, though a Hebrew, was re- 
jected. At the age of nineteen, and when 
capable of judging and acting for himself, he 
despised his birthright, rejected Christ in that 
act, and God rejected him. The Ishmaelites 
and the Edomites, therefore, though Hebrews 
by blood, were not Hebrews in truth, since 
they were both destitute of the vital principle 
of Hebrew nationality. 

The Jews also, as a people, ceased to be 
Jews on their rejection of their Messiah. 
" He is a Jew who is one inwardly." The 
tribes that perished in the wilderness u could 
not enter in, because of unbelief." Whole na- 
tions, and that from the earliest times, had 
had their claims to Hebrew nationality vitiated 
on this principle. Faith was essential to it. 

" They are not all Israel which are of Israel, 
neither because they are the seed of Abraham 
are they all children, 'but in Isaac shall thy 
seed be called ;' i.e. they which are the children 
of the flesh these are not the children of God, 
but the children of the promise are counted for 
the seed." 

The Gentiles, also, by faith become Abra- 



Isaac's patrimony. 315 

ham's seed, are incorporated into bis great 
family, are heirs according to the pi^mise. 
They change their relations when they become 
Christians. But the Jew, in becoming a Chris- 
tian, changes not his. He is like an original 
branch broken from the olive-tree and then 
re-engrafted into the parent stock. He is 
naturally an heir; and, if he severs his connec- 
tion by unbelief, it is the fault of his conduct, 
not of his blood. 

Hence, the Gentile had no other tie of na- 
tionality than that of faith. He, like a wild 
branch, was grafted in among the natural 
branches, and with them partook of the root 
and fatness of the tree. The converted Gen- 
tiles were, on this account, called by the 
apostles strangers and aliens, who by their 
faith had become fellow-citizens of the saints 
and of the household of faith. The lineal Jew 
was, therefore, respected as one having a na- 
tural precedence over the Gentile. To his 
people pertained the adoption, the glory, the 
covenants, the service of God, the promises, 
whose were the fathers, and of whom, as per- 
taining to the flesh, Christ came. 

Christ was a Hebrew, and of the house of 
David. The twelve apostles were Jews. To 
them, as such, and respected as believers, it 



316 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

was given to edit the New Testament, to 
gather and organize the Christian church, and 
in it to remain umpires in the decision of 
every question of faith and practice. Their 
recorded utterances are hence made final in 
every debate on these subjects to the end of 
time. They "sit on twelve thrones, judging 
the twelve tribes of Israel." The New Testa- 
ment church was not a new church, but a con- 
tinuation of the old under new forms and 
with additional privileges. By uniting with 
it, Gentiles became the children of Abraham. 

The following admonition derives all its force 
from this consideration : — " Boast not against 
the branches ; . . . . thou bearest not the root, 

but the root thee If thou wert cut out 

of the olive-tree which is wild by nature, and 
wert graffed contrary to nature into a good 
olive-tree ; how much more shall these, which 
be the natural branches, be graffed into their 
own olive-tree? For I would not, brethren, 
that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, 
lest ye should be wise in your own conceits, 
that blindness in part has happened to Israel, 
until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. 
And so all Israel shall be saved : as it is writ- 
ten, There shall come out of Zion the Deliverer, 
and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob." 



Isaac's patrimony. 317 

The Gentile, in common with the Jew, by 
faith inherits the righteousness of faith. This 
righteousness was not a political or a patri- 
monial, but a spiritual, blessing. It did not 
entitle the Gentile to the Holy Land. But the 
Jew, having been excluded from it as a just 
severity against his unbelief, returns to his 
normal state in it, when, by his faith, he is 
restored to divine favour. 

In harmony with this view, his blindness is 
represented as partial, not perpetual. " Blind- 
ness in part has happened to Israel, until the 
fulness of the Gentiles be come in." It is 
partial, temporary, and must cease at the ap- 
pointed time. But his blindness and his exile 
are to cease together. 

I need not here repeat, but simply call to 
mind, what I have already said in the previous 
chapter on the down-treading of the land of 
Canaan for a limited period. It sustains the 
position now taken. 

Other Scriptures suggest with equal clear- 
ness this twofold restoration. The institutions 
of the Jews were none of them conventional. 
Their entire polity was theocratical throughout. 
All authority, office, law, worship, and all the 
forms of either, were from Heaven, not of men. 
This made all Palestine, in all parts of it ; 



318 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

ultimately dependencies of Jerusalem, in which 
city the theocratical king resided, and the 
high-priest officiated as the divinely-appointed 
president of the sanhedrim. To Jerusalem 
the tribes went up not only to worship, but 
for justice and for the ultimate determination 
of controversies. 

Hence, Jerusalem came to be the place of 
trial and of execution, — the spot more stained 
than any other with the blood of legalized 
murder. In the twenty-third chapter of Mat- 
thew, from verse 23, our Lord first addresses 
the scribes and Pharisees, the men in power, 
denounces their l^pocrisies, frauds, and mal- 
versations; and then he continues: — "Behold, 
I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and 
scribes : and some of them ye shall kill and 
crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in 
your synagogues, and persecute them from city 
to city : that upon you may come all the right- 
eous blood shed upon the earth 

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the 
prophets, and stonest them which are sent 
unto thee, how often would I have gathered 
thy children together, even as a hen gathereth 
her chickens under her wings, and ye would 
not! Behold, your house is left unto you 
desolate. For I say unto you, Ye shall not 



fSAAC'S PATRIMONY. 319 

see me henceforth till ye shall say, Blessed is 
he that cometh in the name of the Lord." 

The terms "Jerusalem" and "generation," 
though not precisely synonymous, comprehend 
the same commonwealth: — "generation" com- 
prising the people that compose it, " Jerusalem," 
the same people under an organized government. 

That our Lord here addresses the Hebrews 
as a national unity is also evident from the 
wide range over which his weeping eye passes 
as he takes in the affecting estimate of their 
guilt. The shadowy past rises up in the dis- 
tinct recollection of its long-forgotten events. 

The Jewish character had ever been the 
same. The perverseness which now oppressed 
him was that with which he had long been fami- 
liar. " How often would I have gathered thy 
children together, as a hen gathereth her chick- 
ens under her wings !" How she sits and calls 
her young, and tenderly chides delay, and 
shelters them from the cold, and exposes her- 
self, all uncomplaining, through the weary day 
and livelong night, to the dew, the wind, the 
rain and driving sleet, to save and rear them ! 
Even so, as a hen gathereth and cherisheth her 
brood, have I sought and cherished thee. Amid 
the woes of bondage, in the mortar-beds of 
Egypt, and in the wilderness forty years long, 



320 ISHMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

and in Canaan, how often would I have 
gathered thee, and by the river of Babylon for 
seventy years. And, during the last three years, 
how often in long nights of prayer, on lonely 
mountains, or amid shame and spitting till 
reproach hath broken my heart, and ye would 
not! 

He also glances down upon the dark and 
guilty future, and cries, " Behold, I send unto 
you prophets, and wise men, and scribes : and 
some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and 
some of them ye shall scourge in your streets, 
and persecute them from city to city." 

Thus, in this vision of their guilt, their 
character for evil had been uniform; it clave 
to their very being as a people. The dying 
cadences of their past ingratitude were even 
now mingling with the reproaches of the pre- 
sent hour and evoking most bitter accusations 
from the anticipated crimes of the future. It 
was evidently a national character now so 
severely reprehended; and it was a national 
doom now so reluctantly pronounced. 

" Behold, your house is left unto you deso- 
late." The house, the place of residence, 
when left desolate, is uninhabited, dreary, and 
falls into decay. 

During most of the time for four hundred 



ISAAC'S PATRIMONY. 321 

years from the period of this denunciation, the 
Jcays were banished from Jerusalem. Its walls 
and temple, levelled with the ground, were left 
in ruins. 

After this, Const an tine permitted the out- 
casts to assemble once a year to bewail their 
exile and the loss of the beautiful house in 
which their fathers worshipped. It was pain- 
ful, even to a foe, to see them at each return- 
ing anniversary, clothed in sackcloth, come in 
long processions, sit down amid broken arches, 
subverted walls and . altars, and to hear the 
bitter wail of the desolate as it rose and floated 
sadly over the surrounding ruins. But even 
this poor privilege has often been denied 
them. 

The soil also has lost its fertility, or, at least, 
has been esteemed worthless for agricultural 
purposes ; and, with every form of possible 
misrule to discourage industry, it still lies un- 
tilled. " The grass withe re th after it groweth 
up ;" the fig-tree blossoms not as aforetime ; 
there is no fruit in the vine ; the labour of the 
olive fails ; the fields yield no meat ; the flock 
is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in 
the stall; the owl roosts on the forsaken bal- 
cony ; the bat clings to the mouldering walls. 

No country on earth within the same limits 



322 ISIIMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 

was ever so filled with people. The smallest 
villages contained at least fifteen thousand, 
the larger twenty or thirty; and these 'were 
quite contiguous to each other. 

A population of four millions, according to 
Volney, inhabited Judea alone. Out of one 
gate of its capital (according to Josephus) six 
hundred thousand dead bodies were carried 
during the siege under Titus, and at least a 
million perished on that occasion. 

Its thronged thoroughfares have ever since 
been comparatively deserted, its " cities wasted, 
without inhabitant, its houses without man." 
The solid masonry of its towns is everywhere 
giving way. The stones are precipitated on the 
inmates, who retire to other apartments for a 
temporary shelter, and whose hands are never 
raised to repair a ruin or to resist the progress 
of decay. 

In that devoted land, all social interest, all 
political importance, is utterly lost, and the 
universal downward tendency cannot be re- 
strained. It is " left desolate." The provi- 
dential aegis has been taken off; and all at- 
tempts, therefore, from external sources, to re- 
store and to rebuild, have proved unavailing. 
Julian, aided by the people and the treasures 
of his empire, abandoned the attempt in de- 



Isaac's patrimony. 323 

spair. Ruin could spoil and mar and im- 
poverish, hut no hand could restore and build: 
the earth rose up in Heaven's controversy, and 
fire-balls drove back the workmen. 

These are some of the reasons for believing 
that the Jews as a nation are intended where 
it is said, " Ye shall not see me henceforth, 
till ye [shall again exist as ye do now, and] 
shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name 
of the Lord." 

The Jews then had a national existence and 
a country ; since then they have had neither. 
Outcast from their own land, they have been 
dispersed into every other, and have been 
mostly disfranchised in them all. They must 
repent, return, and reconstruct their pros- 
trated polity, and say, "Blessed is he that 
cometh in the name of the Lord." For it was 
not the individuals of that generation who 
were addressed as such, but the Hebrews as 
they existed in an organized state, in a col- 
lective national unity and responsibility ; and in 
this same capacity are they to see by faith and 
acknowledge the Messiah. 

Zechariah (chap. xii. verse 10) represents 
the house of David and the inhabitants of Je- 
rusalem as deeply penitent while looking on 
Him whom they had pierced. The same nation, 



324 ISHMAEL AND TnE CHURCH. 

in the same land in which they rejected and 
murdered, shall see and adore their Lord. 

The promise also of a restoration to the 
favour of God, and simultaneously to their 
own land, is often repeated. "In the day" 
(says Ezekiel, chap, xxxvi.) "that I shall have 
cleansed you from all your iniquities I will 
also cause you to dwell in the cities, and the 
wastes shall be builded." The repentance and 
the return synchronize. The resurrection 
(detailed by this prophet in the next chapter) 
of the whole house of Israel makes equally 
clear assurance of the twofold restoration, — the 
one to spiritual, the other to national, life. 

The promise also which in the same chapter 
is subjoined — to wit : that they should never 
more be divided into two nations, but ever 
after that event be and remain one nation, 
under one king and shepherd — fixes this pre- 
dicted restoration to a period subsequent to the 
Christian era, and, indeed, to our own times, 
since it has never yet occurred. 

The valley also seen in this vision stretches 
out under the eye of the prophet to the horizon, 
and is the vast charnel of Israel's dispersed 
generations. Like the bones of an immense 
and fallen army, separated the one from the 
other, and promiscuously scattered over the 



Isaac's patrimony. 32o 

plain, so had Israel lost home and country, 
political and ecclesiastical life, ruler and priest, 
law and altar; and, in the dissolution of all 
the bonds of a living commonwealth, they 
were found scattered into every kingdom, and 
without a resting-place in any; — among foes 
who, while they refused them organized life, 
protected them at the same time from exter- 
mination; who, while they repressed among 
them every effort to reconstruct their ruined 
nationality, refused also interment to its bones. 
The resurrection takes place where the bones 
lie scattered ; the restoration follows. 

"If," says Paul, "the casting away of them 
be the reconciling of the world, what shall the 
receiving of them be but life from the dead ?" 
Both events are operative. The casting away 
is the reconciling of the world; the receiving 
of them, life from the dead. 

The original grant to Abraham and to his 
posterity has never yet fully come into their 
possession. That grant extended from the 
entering-in of Hamath the Great, (far north of 
any territory ever yet occupied by them,) to 
the river of Egypt, — a limit far south of any of 
their former possessions. It was also to extend, 
from west to east, from the foot of the Medi- 
terranean to the Euphrates. David made 

28 



326 ISHMAEL AND THE CIIUIICH. 

most of this whole country tributary ; but Israel 
never occupied it, never filled it from limit to 
limit with men like a flock. A part of the 
Holy Land has been very densely settled; but 
the remainder has ever been in the possession 
of others. 

The land also evidently awaits the return 
of its children. The materials for constructing 
cities, dwellings, terraces, causeways, bridges, 
are all on the ground, ready to rise out of the 
heaps of rubbish and to subserve all the pur- 
poses of the restored community. The soil 
so long unfilled has been drinking in fer- 
tility from the dew of heaven, and is now more 
capable than ever of sustaining an immense 
population. Down-trodden and desolate, it 
mourns the absence of its rightful cultivators, 
and refuses to yield its increase to the hands 
of aliens. 

Its expatriated heirs are likewise without a 
home or a country elsewhere, and who, as the 
world's bankers and merchants, can, on the 
shortest notice, when the way is prepared, 
gratify their long-cherished desire to return. 

The obstruction also at the present time in 
their way in Europe and Asia is already fallen 
into the processes of a fatal decay. Ishmael, 
smitten with decline and consumption, cannot 



Isaac's patrimony. 327 

long retain the sceptre or the sword. His eye 
waxes dim; untoward events surprise him; 
the angel of the bottomless pit, who opened 
for him the cave of Hara, is now opening for 
him the gates of death ; the pestilential damps 
of the Crimea and of the Bosphorus are but 
the margins of that dark cloud hanging in 
deadly wreaths over every centre of life in 
his doomed and perishing being. What then, 
within a brief period, will there be to hinder 
Israel's return ? 

This great event, — oh ! how desirable, since 
it is linked with the world's salvation ! — it shall 
be life from the dead. Then "many people 
shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up 
to the mountain of the Lord, to the house 
of the God of Jacob; and he will teach of his 
ways, and we will walk in his paths;" then 
shall sectional animosities and the wars of un- 
congenial races cease, swords be beaten into 
ploughshares, and spears into pruning-hooks, 
fierce men loose their destructive propensities, 
and a renovated world resound with the melo- 
dies of Zion and the songs of the reaper. 

Egypt has become the basest of kingdoms ; 
the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency is as 
when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. 
Persia and Greece, loosed from their founda- 






328 ISIIMAEL AND THE CHURCH. 



tions by Ishmael, are afloat at all uncertainties 
in a sea which is itself soon to waste away in 
its own dissolving bed. Koine rises but to fall ; 
while, amid the ruins of despairing nations, Zion 
rises to fall no more. 



"See thy bright altars throng'd with prostrate kings, 
And heap'd with products of Sabean springs ! 
For thee Idum^'s spicy forests blow, 
And seeds of gold in Ophir's mountains glow. 
See heaven his sparkling portals wide display, 
And break upon thee in a flood of day ! 
No more the rising sun shall gild the morn, 
Nor evening Cynthia fill her silver horn ; 
But lost, dissolved in thy superior rays, 
One tide of glory, one unclouded blaze, 
O'erflow thy courts : the Light himself shall shine 
Reveal'd, and God's eternal day be thine. 
The seas shall waste, the skies in smoke decay, 
Rocks fall to dust, and mountains melt away ; 
But, fix'd his word, his saving power remains : 
Thy realm forever lasts ; thine own Messiah reigns. 

Pope's Messiah. 



THE END. 



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